Ghulam Nabi, a poor resident of Mohmand tribal district, pulled out a two-inch-thick bundle of visiting cards from his pocket in front of television cameras and asked what he could do with those. “People come and give me their visiting cards but they cannot bring back my Farishta,” he said, referring to his 10-year-old daughter who was found murdered in Islamabad’s Shahzad Town area last month.

Nabi asked people not to visit his house anymore. Otherwise he would be compelled to leave his residence. It is a house of mourning but dignitaries come here to address the news media, he said.

His words were a protest against a tragic pattern that cases of child sexual abuse follow in Pakistan.

These cases take place every day, perhaps every hour. Despite this, we express our surprise and disgust each time a case gets picked up, for whatever reasons, by the media. All the well known personalities – whether politicians or those from non-governmental organisations – suddenly start flocking at the victim’s house, in front of the press clubs or inside television studios. And then nothing happens.

How could we have treated Nabi’s daughter differently from any other child abuse victim?

A pretty Pashtun girl, she vanished on May 15. Her father went to a police station to file a missing person report after she did not return home by that evening. The police told him to wait. She might have eloped with somebody, they suggested. Her body was found on May 20. Even then the police were reluctant to register a case. It was only after her family and some political activists blocked a major intersection in Islamabad that the case was registered.

By then, it was too late for Farishta and her parents. She was gone forever — like so many other young victims of sexual abuse.

It did not have to be this way. If the police had acted like conscientious public servants and taken immediate action upon her father’s complaint, she could have been found alive. But it was not to be and we do not know if and when that will change.

Sexual abuse of children exists in every society. Governments cannot be blamed if and when it happens. But governments must be held answerable when police fail to take appropriate and necessary action, when proper laws do not exist, when victims of abuse are ridiculed and when no legal or judicial mechanism exists to handle such cases sensitively.

In the absence of such mechanisms, these cases are handled so crudely that the plight of the victims gets drowned in meaningless rhetoric and even more useless processes and procedures.

Television channels invite experts, including psychologists, to offer analysis after each such incident. The explanations these experts give usually range from the existence of the internet to the spread of a liberal and modernised culture. Generally, they also highlight the negative effects movies, television and co-education are having on young minds. The victim’s dress, sexual suppression in the society, hatred for strong women and the urge to control women in general — all are offered as possible explanations.

I really do not know if these factors explain anything.

Take, for instance, the argument that a lack of outlets for sexual gratification is an obvious reason for the prevalence of children’s sexual abuse. If that is the case, these crimes should not be found in the West, particularly the Scandinavian countries and the United States, which has a highly permissive culture in sexual matters. Yet children are being sexually abused in the West as well.

Others may argue that recourse to religion is the best solution as it teaches one to control sexual urges. Many students abused in madrasas and many children raped in catholic churches may disagree with this argument. There is voyeurism even at the shrines of Sufi saints.

In other words, it is not easy to control the sexual abuse of children though efforts must be made to curtail its incidence.

One effective starting point to manage and prevent it is home: a lot depends on how parents raise their children, teaching them how to respect others and why not to violate the privacy of others. Simultaneously, children can be taught to refuse being touched in a manner which makes them uneasy and uncomfortable.

Schools, obviously, are the next important place where children can be taught the same thing in a more formal environment. In a limited manner, media, too, can do the same thing.

Laws alone certainly do not offer a solution. In Pakistan’s case, they seem to be allowing a bad situation turn worse. Two laws help illustrate how.

Abduction of any under-14 child leading to his or her murder or rape is punishable with death under Section 364-A of the Pakistan Penal Code. Section 376 of the same code provides for death penalty in the event of a minor’s rape. The problem with the two laws is clear: if the offence of sexual abuse is punishable by death, then an offender aware of the law is more than likely to kill the victim. Since punishment for both the crimes is same, the killing may help him remove the most potent witness and the most incriminating piece of evidence against him.

Consider the case of a 22-year-old woman who was recently gang raped by four people, including three policemen, in Rawalpindi when she was doing sehri in her car in the small hours. After raping her and recording it on their mobile phones, the culprits dumped her near a hostel she was living in. The woman was bold enough to report the crime and identify her rapists. This would not have been possible if she had been killed.

The lawmakers have obviously not pondered about the fact that making punishments more stringent for sexual offenses does not prevent such crimes but, on the contrary, endangers the lives of the victims.

In any case, stricter punishments – including hanging and beheading – are not the best deterrence as many may think. What to talk of Pakistan, sexual offences are widely prevalent even in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran where the death sentence awarded to sexual offenders is carried out in public.

Opponents of the death penalty, additionally, argue that judicial systems and investigation and prosecution mechanisms run by the states are prone to making mistakes. But a death sentence once carried out is irreversible. This is true and, therefore, stringent checks should be introduced in the investigation and trial of cases involving the death penalty. It should be given in the rarest of the rare cases.

Of course, it does not mean that all punishments should be done away with since they do not deter crime. On the other hand, they should be seen more as a mechanism to provide justice rather than as a means to control and prevent crime.

Before we can start doing that, however, we must first recognise that our society has scant regard for the rule of law. In such a society, legal and judicial means alone cannot provide justice to children who suffer sexual abuse. In fact, some crimes committed against them go even unnoticed because the society is careless in its treatment of these victims. To give just one example, Section 376-A was inserted in 2016 in the Pakistan Penal Code to make it a punishable crime to print or publish the name “or any matter which may make known [the] identity” of the victims of sexual offences. Those who print and publish their names are liable to be punished with three years in prison and some fine. Yet, this law is violated every day by all of us, including the news media and the superior courts. Without paying any heed to it, we continue to name the victims with a collective impunity.

With respect for law being so low, how can a judicial and legal system work effectively to deter sexual crimes against children?

The writer is an advocate of the Supreme Court.

This article was published in the Herald's June 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Over the last couple of months, several Chinese nationals have been arrested from the central regions of Pakistan for allegedly trying to smuggle local girls to China. They reportedly got into staged marriages with those girls – many of whom belong to the Christian community – so that they could be taken out of Pakistan allegedly for use in sex trade. Those arrested include some Pakistani matchmakers and pastors who, respectively, facilitated and reportedly solemnised 1,200 of those marriages.

Meanwhile, several girls have appeared on television channels and approached law enforcement authorities to state that they were tricked into marrying their Chinese spouses on the assumption that they shared their religion. Some girls alleged that they were maltreated by their Chinese husbands who kept them in confinement to force them into prostitution.

The Chinese embassy in Islamabad, however, has said Pakistani brides are neither being trafficked to China nor are they being coerced into working in sex trade there. But the embassy has promised to carry out further investigations.

While the truth will take time to emerge, the details that are already known are hardly surprising. These are only a fresh reminder of the long-standing social problems and economic fault lines that routinely keep embarrassing us as a society and a state.

We all know that poverty and ignorance, coupled with a missing rule of law, are responsible for subjecting a huge number of Pakistanis to all kinds of exploitation. Bad governance has rendered our administrative system virtually dysfunctional. Our justice system, too, is so porous that even proven criminals, including transnational trafficking rackets, can pass through it with impunity. On top of that, our legal system denies the members of religious minorities even those protections that the majority community has. The law of the land, essentially, ignores their existence unless it needs to prosecute and punish them for some reason.

Even more importantly, such national embarrassment as has resulted from the trafficking allegations often fades away without eliciting a proper response from decision makers. Their focus remains on addressing public perceptions in the short run rather than finding long-term remedies for the deep-seated problems that cause that embarrassment in the first place. The present case underscores all this — and then some more.

Admittedly, women from a poor and socially marginalised minority community are always more likely to be abused than anyone else in the country. The fact that Christian family laws do not provide for the registration of Christian marriages with union councils and their certification by the National Database Registration Authority makes Christian women highly vulnerable to abuse. (Though the Supreme Court instructed the government on January 16, 2019 to remove this legal lacuna, no action has been taken yet). Successive governments have similarly failed to remove an anomaly between the Christian Marriage Act 1872 – which provides that a Christian girl can be married at the age of 14 – and other laws that have raised the marriageable age for girls to at least 16.

What further complicates these problems is the fact that the Punjab government allows self-proclaimed pastors and bishops to be registered under the Societies Act 1860. To become eligible for registration, they only need to show a following of 200 people. These clergymen are often unqualified to oversee religious ceremonies, including marriages, and thereby cause many problems such as the solemnisation of illegal marriages, the creation of theological divisions and a proliferation of superstitious practices. The government cannot do anything about them since no law exists that can regulate churches and clergy.

Then there are entrenched social and economic factors that keep the marginalised just that — marginalised. A 2018 survey carried out by the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women showed that over 80 per cent women belonging to minority religious communities participate in the province’s labour force — compared to a 36 per cent participation by women’s provincial population in general. This, obviously, means that most non-Muslim women have no option but to work – mostly in low-paying, manual jobs – in order to survive. The prospect of a marriage changing this situation for the better is often too tempting for them to dismiss.

The alleged trafficking of Pakistani girls to China and elsewhere, therefore, is not a one-off criminal incident that will go away once those involved in it have been tried and punished. It results from a combination of structural factors that include poverty, illiteracy and social and legal exclusion that turn large parts of the populace into fragmented and uninformed groups who can be exploited by anyone with an alluring idea to improve their lives.

When a news story breaks about that idea having gone rogue, a semblance of action emerges but then business as usual resumes soon — until another story emerges.

The writer is a human rights professional and a freelance journalist.

This article was published in the Herald's June 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

I am back. With a vengeance. Teeth sharpened, claws twitching like a cat about to devour a recently mutilated mouse. It has been torturous watching the scenes which shall be placed on the slaughtering block and chopped up, frame by frame, deconstructed, dismantled and disembowelled for the deeper meaning inherent in what otherwise appears to be nothing but a poorly conceived and executed attempt to entertain the viewing masses.

When I set out to analyse the fare that is being produced and aired in the name of entertainment, I had only a vague idea how insidious the design of this industry could be, how dangerous the kinds of notions that form the foundation of the scripts that are acted out, literally, by men and women who may just be doing what seems to be a ‘job’.

Is it possible that the damage inherent in the roles and scenarios being played out escapes the entire production team? Can an actor actually take on a character without analysing the significance of the dialogue, the narrative, the denouement of the entire plot line? Apparently, all of this is possible. Apparently, there is no need to consider the implausibility of certain events or to reconsider the retrogressive nature of certain cultural notions that reinforce already existing values that are neither just nor desirable.

Let us begin with addressing the issue of sanity and its lack thereof. In the soaps viewed, more than just a few appear to base their ‘drama’ on the madness of the potential heroine: this can be an unwed young woman, a married young woman, a childless young woman, or a recently divorced young woman. The common factor shared by this rich variety of characters is that they are deeply, irretrievably unhappy and, not to overstate this, that they are young.

They are also usually fair complexioned, reasonably pleasant looking, with hair the colour of a Makrani sunset. They are usually totally powerless; they haven’t got a college degree; they do not work; and they have no ambition to do anything other than get married, have children and attend to the whims and fancies of husbands, mothers-in-law and sundry neighbours who breeze in and out of bedrooms, lounges, kitchens and courtyards, with nothing to do other than enquire about the unwed daughter, the married one, the childless one and, of course, in conspiratorial whispers, the divorced one.

Now, the various reasons the aforementioned young women are rendered insane present themselves as follows: the unwed daughter has lost it since she has not received the right marriage proposal; the married one has stopped speaking since she has married the wrong man; the childless woman weeps endlessly, copious glycerine tears pouring out of mascaraed eyes, endlessly berated for being barren; and the divorced woman stares at walls uselessly for she is just a used good, a burden on her parents and hard-working or, alternately, jobless brothers.

A divorced woman is a shunned woman so her madness does not really count. She must have been mad to start with and that could be the reason why she was not able to keep a marriage going, despite having married the wrong man, of course. No sympathy for such marital miscalculations! The strange behaviour of the unwed girl, the wrongly married girl and the childless girl with a womb as vacant as the look in her eyes, however, is something that needs redressal.

In families across the country, supposedly depicted in the plethora of soaps being broadcasted night and ceaseless day, young girls are seen sitting or lying down on beds, doing nothing, sitting on sofas with golden frames and lurid upholstery to make up for the vapid conversation and insipid histrionics, or they are opening gates for milkmen, vegetable vendors or total strangers who happen to form a link to the riveting happenings which shall unfold scene after painful scene.

Therefore, given that these young women have absolutely nothing else to do other than lounge around like lizards sunbathing on a rock, it should certainly not come as a surprise when one of them stops talking or starts staring at unseen things on walls littered haphazardly with calendars several years too old, clocks whose hands do not move and pictures of cats and babies, and red roses growing in some distant garden (a metaphor for kittens and babies growing in a distant womb, clearly).

The very fact that these frail, jobless, sad yet meticulously made over characters display symptoms which are not very hard to distinguish from the daily pattern of their behaviour speaks volumes for the deviousness of the minds responsible for churning out script after vacuous script. Once the non-symptoms of supposed madness have been detected and acknowledged, usually through a protracted process of pointless and rhetorical question asking (‘kya ho gaya hai bitya ko?’), the responsible adults in the young girl’s family make a beeline for the mysterious yet familiar environs of dubious men who claim to have the solution up their sleeve, or in the pot, so to speak. Instead of consulting a doctor or even the local midwife (who has knowledge about ‘wombs with no view’ that would make the most competent obstetrician or gynaecologist blush with shame), the local aamil or pir baba is sought out.

The journey to his abode is a harrowing one — through narrow lanes and eerie, fog-filled courtyards leading to an ‘astaana’ marked with strange symbols evocative of the intriguing spiral which serves as a symbol of the White Walkers in Game of Thrones.

We step inside the pir baba’s workplace for that is what it is, a fully equipped office of sorts, complete with dead goats’ heads, severed hands of babies, bloodied chicken feathers, plastic skulls, a scatter of pins and needles, and lots and lots of green chillies and lemons, enough to make up a nice garnishing on a baara masaalay ki chaat. The place is ill-lit, except for a rush of HMI light filtering through a ventilator placed in a wall opposite the throne of the said pir baba.

The light hits the pir baba’s bearded face. His eyes are hooded, his mouth chanting a mumbled mantra. His neck is weighed down by a flood of beaded garlands and he wears a long, loose garment, as green as a field of alfalfa on a sunny day. The pir baba has clearly not been to a barbershop in a long while; he shakes his tresses from side to side as the said sad-mad (young) woman is brought into the room by the said (responsible) adult member of her family.

Standing besides the pir baba is the Loyal Minion, the Assistant Director, Exorcism Branch of Retrogressive Ville, if you will. He is usually a slight man, not portly like his Master of Magical Ability. The assistant is poorly dressed, bereft of jewellery or any finery, and he squats or stands with gaze lowered, ready to strike if things get out of hand. And things do get out of hand as the satanic manifestation that has gotten a hold of the said sad-mad (young) woman reaches a fever pitch, with the pir baba shaking a lance or a jharroo at the said sad-mad woman, screaming horrific invective at the devil, urging the non-rent-paying shaitan to leave the body it has possessed or else there will be more shaking and shouting, and general pandemonium.

The script can veer into different directions at this point: an intervention takes place while the sad-mad maiden is being supposedly beaten to within an inch of her otherwise living-dead state. Sometimes it is a portly, stout, white-haired grandmother who finds her way through the labyrinth of narrow lanes and alleyways, not daunted by the creeping fog (smoke machines have a special place in the world of make-believe), determined to find the lost, sad-mad and soon-to-be-glad girl.

At other times it is a young man who steps in between the pir baba’s jharroo and the supposedly possessed but nubile body of the sad-mad-and-not-yet-glad young woman. In the former case, the grandmother falls at the feet of the enraged pir baba (the rage comes from the fact that the shaitan has illegally occupied a rather attractive accommodation). She wails and pleads and beseeches the Whipping Weirdo to spare her granddaughter. But the Whipping Weirdo is committed to the exorcism and continues to flagellate the young -sad-mad-and-not-yet-glad woman. The minion (Assistant Director, Ministry of Total Buffoonery) aids and abets his master by shouting ‘Haq Allah! Sach Allah, Baqi sab Jhoooth!’ until the young-sad-mad-and-not-yet-glad woman swoons and falls into a lifeless heap on the chilli and lemon festooned floor of the said voodoo venue.

Of course, the fact that she is usually equally lifeless while draped over a bed or slumbering on a sofa escapes the writer, director, producer and audience. In fact, the only time that said character actually comes to life is when she is mall crawling or merrily dancing at her best friend’s henna ceremony. Once the exorcism is over, the pir baba retires to his shady corner while the assistant director minion presses his master’s legs or ushers out the grateful grandmother/young, unknown stranger man/the possessed woman and perhaps the rickshaw driver who appears out of the blue into said shady lane.

This then, is the method to the madness of the young-sad-mad-and-not-yet-glad woman. As the sun rises over the horizon the next day, we will know for sure that the coveted rishta has come, that the estranged husband has returned, that the longed-for child will blossom in the hitherto empty womb. And back at the astaana of the Whipping Weirdo, more goat heads and chicken feathers vie for space on the cold brick floor, nestling themselves comfortably in the imagination of an audience hanging off its bed/golden sofa/garden chair, waiting for the next episode of straining moments of the weak.

The article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is an actor, film-maker and human rights activist.

A few days ago I almost fell for Uncle Tetsu. Both literally and figuratively. I tripped on a small step leading up to the cafe and afterwards was quite enthralled by the open kitchen and lovely, warm interior. But it didn’t taste as good as it looked. Uncle Tetsu is a new franchise in Lahore. It started in 1990 in Japan but has gotten enough traction that my sister who lives in Canada has not only had it, but is quite fond of it. 

The cafe is spacious with seating both inside and outside, and there are coffee and tea options to go along with cheesecakes, not to mention very palatable cheese sticks. It was all very inviting, very pleasing to the eye.

When I started on my first Japanese cheesecake I liked how dry, soft and fluffy it was. Cheesecakes can be a bit mushy at times but this was a clean break from pulp or cream. They also made it right in front of me which is always a plus. But halfway through inhaling this cheesecake I realised something else too — how utterly bland it was. 

Maybe bland is not the right word. It was eggy. I mean all cheesecakes are eggy but this was eggy in not a good way. This was eggy without being anything else along with it. Think scrambled eggs without any condiments. Which leaves one wanting; wanting some sugar, wanting some cream, wanting some pizzazz and, before long, wanting something else. 

Don’t get me wrong. In isolation, a Japanese cheesecake is not bad. I just don’t think it is going to be a hit in Lahore considering that our idea of desserts is that you should be diabetic by the time you are finished. 

The Japanese are weaned on seafood and ramen. Ramen also has fewer condiments sprinkled on top of the noodles. Unlike, say, a hot and spicy pad thai. 

We all know the Japanese have strange eating habits. They eat raw, uncooked fish, for heaven’s sake. So I can imagine some man called Tetsu thought: “This cheesecake thing is too sweet, let us remove the sugar and most of the cheese. Let us add more eggs, a pinch of yolk here, a smattering of whites there. Did I say add more eggs? Good, now add another layer of eggs on top of the egg batter. There it is perfect. Now you can’t taste anything else.” 

I think Uncle Tetsu is going to remain a niche, hipster place to come to — a place where you take more pictures for Instagram purposes than you consume food. Which is pretty much what I did and left half the cake unfinished. 

The conventional cheesecakes themselves are niche, hipster things to consume in Lahore. I mean my mother loves them but my mother is a bit of a hipster too. 

As a bona fide Lahori guy, I was late to the cheesecake party to begin with. I was more of a ‘give-me-nihari-for-dessert-too’ person. Cakes were just something you cut open and then ignored at birthdays. 

I mean, it took me years to learn that mud cakes aren’t made from mud. And that red velvet is actually chocolate. You can shake your heads and smirk all you want but I feel like I represent middle-class Lahori cake appetites pretty well: it is a niche, elite hobby until Gourmet Foods starts making them. But Gourmet is still busy making plain sponge cakes. 

There were barely a handful of cake names I remembered growing up. I remember black forest was really popular, to the point where everything remotely dark was black forest. Fudge was black forest, truffle was black forest, some chocolate sitting close to baking soda was also black forest. 

Everything that wasn’t black forest was a pineapple cake. 

Then came the plain cakes that took over the cake market and are still ubiquitous, sent as gifts to people you don’t like. Cakes so simple they feel like they are just some batter that has been inflated, possibly with a bicycle pump. The Japanese cheesecake definitely reminds me of those. 

The writer was previously a staffer at the Herald.

The article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Newspapers and television channels have reported several cases of medical negligence last month. In perhaps the most widely reported among them, a nine-month-old girl died at a private hospital in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar area on April 15 after she was given a wrong injection. A week or so later, a quack reportedly administered a wrong injection to another child in the same city, leading to the child’s death.

Towards the end of the month, news media was flooded with reports that a large number of children have been found to be HIV positive in Sindh’s Larkana district, allegedly due to illegal and hazardous medical practices prevalent there.

These incidents can be attributed to two broad causes: medical malpractices and professional negligence. The distinction between the two is important. The latter is an act by a qualified and trained healthcare provider who deviates from scientific practices and standard operating procedures, resulting in injury or permanent damage to his or her patients. The former is an act of illegal use of medicine, skills or equipment by an unqualified person impersonating as a healthcare provider — a criminal act that endangers lives.

Before we proceed to discuss how to tackle these two problems, we need to be clear that medical or surgical negligence by qualified and trained professionals is not uncommon. Cases involving this kind of negligence have been reported not just from developing countries like Pakistan but also from the developed ones. For instance, between 44,000 and 98,000 fatalities reportedly occur in the United States every year due to mistakes by medical workers. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service was, similarly, reported to have dealt with 5,609 claims of clinical negligence and 3,766 claims of non-clinical negligence in 2004-05.

The findings of a 1984 study that reviewed 30,121 randomly selected patient records from 51 randomly selected acute care hospitals in New York state suggest something similar. The review showed adverse impacts of hospitalisation in 3.7 per cent of all the records examined. Out of these, 27.6 per cent adverse impacts were caused by some kind of negligence.

There is no way to develop a healthcare system where there are no errors, no negligence. Human beings are not perfect so some errors are bound to happen even in the most efficient of the human-devised systems.

The menace of quackery, on the other hand, is mostly a developing world phenomenon. Illegal medical practices are quite common not just in Pakistan but also in the rest of South Asia, and as well as other parts of the globe. These can certainly be eradicated through effective administrative mechanisms.

Pakistan’s healthcare system, however, is neither equipped to deal with medical negligence nor does it have efficient institutional arrangements in place to get rid of quacks. While it does not ensure that legitimate healthcare providers always follow scientific practices and protocols, it also has no effective way to stop unqualified people from impersonating doctors.

Admittedly, there is a dire need to reorganise Pakistan’s entire healthcare system. We not just need to control and minimise the incidents of medical negligence, we also need to remove the loopholes that healthcare regulation and administration suffer at the grass roots level.

To achieve these twin objectives, Pakistan must look into its medical training and healthcare delivery system. It must also make strong institutional arrangements for monitoring and quality control of medical and paramedical training. Similarly, healthcare administrators should look into duty hours, work ethics and work commitments of medical professionals as possible reasons for negligence and malpractices and address these problems as effectively as possible.

Some other much-needed steps include the protection of legal rights of both doctors and patients and the provision of financial and administrative autonomy to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (that oversees doctors and dentists in the country) and healthcare commissions (mandated to regulate clinics and hospitals).

It is equally important to ensure that doctors and other medical practitioners working in the government sector are paid well and their service structure is devised in such a way that it rewards hard work, merit and seniority in equal measure. At the same time, there should be mandatory assessments of their professional competence at regular intervals.

Most crucially, Pakistan must increase its current level of spending on healthcare – which stands at less than one per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – to four to six per cent of its GDP. Most of this money should be spent on putting in place a corruption-free healthcare delivery system in the public sector in order to benefit the people of the country — and not just a rich and privileged elite.

The writer is the chairman of Sindh Health Care Commission.

This article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

We have all experienced heartache at some point in our lives. It is usually the romantic, melancholic variety that writers and poets wax lyrical about, but this has nothing in common with that sharp pain in the chest which can take one’s breath away and require a headlong dash to the nearest emergency. The doctor there does not see the cute emoji we attach to lovelorn texts but rather clogged blood vessels and dysfunctional muscular tissue. This reality check usually comes as a rude shock to us.

In much the same way, we may romanticise the air that surrounds us all we want – the cool breeze in the summer that carries the sweet scent of jasmine or the dreamy fog in the winters that makes one want to snuggle in bed with a hot cup of tea – but in reality few of us realise how pernicious that breeze or fog is or what havoc it is wreaking on our bodies.

The truth is that we are breathing in poison with every breath we take and it is taking a terrible toll on our health. Here is how: in the short-term, exposures of a few hours or a few days can contribute to ear, nose and throat irritation. The irritation usually disappears with the removal of the pollutants. Those living in Lahore are familiar with these symptoms when these appear along with our annual smog season.

The misperception is that when the smog clears the air quality improves. Not really. The pollution level comes down and becomes invisible after the smog leaves but it still remains above danger levels. Such short-term exposure may also cause and aggravate lower-respiratory and chronic conditions such as allergies, asthma and bronchitis. In people with heart disease, it can lead to heart attacks, arrhythmias and even death.

However, the biggest impact comes from long-term exposure (that is, weeks, months and years) to air pollutants which increases a person’s chances of dying from heart disease, chronic respiratory diseases, lung infections, lung cancer and diabetes. This exposure can also cause other health problems including metabolic dysfunction, disorders of the central nervous system (including neurological and psychiatric diseases) and adverse pregnancy, and developmental outcomes (for example, preterm birth, low birth weight and restriction in the growth of foetus).

To put this in perspective, according to one estimate, Lahore only had two days in the whole of the year 2017 in which air quality was of acceptable standards. Other big cities face a similar situation but accurate data for them is not available. It would, therefore, be fair to say that the majority of our urban citizens are exposed to long-term air pollution.

So how does this translate for those of us living in Pakistan? The State of Global Air 2019 report has some scary statistics. It tells us that air pollution is the sixth leading risk factor for mortality in Pakistan, having caused more than 128,000 deaths in 2017 alone. An even more alarming fact is that we lose up to two years and eight months in life expectancy at birth due to exposure to bad quality air. And almost 100 per cent of our population lives in areas where harmful particulate matter in the air is above the least stringent air quality target set by the World Health Organisation. That means the problem is not just in the cities, it is also in our villages and even in our hill resorts where we thought we could breathe clean air.

We seem blissfully unaware that we have a serious public health emergency on our hands. The issue is often obfuscated by technical jargon on the types of pollution, the measurement indices and the desired target levels. How many people understand what PM2.5 is, or what a concentration of 58 μg/m3 as opposed to 35 μg/m3 means? How many know the difference between PM2.5, HAP (household air pollution) and ambient ozone levels? These terms, usually used for describing the issue of air pollution, make the knowledge of the air quality incomprehensible to general public.

And here lies the catch. We do not sufficiently understand the problem. The government, though admittedly more sympathetic to environmental concerns than previous administrations, does not seem adequately cognisant of the gravity of the issue. This is reflected in the lack of policy reforms and some outright paradoxical measures in the form of heavier reliance on coal-fired power plants and the persistent use of substandard transport fuel.

In the meantime, Pakistan has achieved second place on the list of top 10 countries with the highest mortality due to air pollution; China and India are tied for the first place. China, however, has shown that decisive government action can deliver results. With stringent policy measures, including the adoption of clean air technology and strict implementation of emission limit regulations, it has been able to turn the tide.
What will it take for our government to show the same level of commitment?

In a dire economic situation with ostensibly many critically important sectors competing for resources, it may seem convenient for the government to put this matter on the back burner. It is perhaps not so easy to make the connection that all other economic activities may become meaningless without a clean environment. More money for hospitals and schools or other infrastructure will not pay dividends if we continue to inhale poison and the lives of our citizens are cut short simply because they breathe.

In the absence, therefore, of a proactive government, the burden for action may fall on the citizens themselves. But for that citizens need to take ownership of their own environment and have access to information. Currently, apart from some committed civil society groups and individuals making a valiant effort to find alternative data sources, the available data on air quality is not only of doubtful accuracy, it is also confined within select government departments. It is being used neither to drive policy nor to educate the public.

If citizens were to take the lead, and the seeds of such a movement are there already, they could become involved in gathering and disseminating air quality data. With air quality monitoring technology becoming more accurate, accessible and affordable, such a ‘citizen science’ approach, which has been used in other countries to make an impact, could be adapted to Pakistan as well. This will have manifold benefits. First and foremost, it will provide the data that is needed for evidence-based planning. Secondly, by raising public awareness, it will motivate people to find local solutions.

They might understand how planting more trees, using public transport, carpooling, bicycling and not burning trash, especially plastics, can have an impact on air quality. They will be better able to protect the more vulnerable groups like pregnant women, children and the elderly during acute episodes of air pollution by keeping them indoor and using masks or air purifiers. They will be more amenable to complying with regulations that the government wants to promulgate but does not have the will and the capacity to enforce — like putting restrictions on burning crops, regulating vehicular emissions and reducing industrial pollution.

Lastly, they might feel more empowered to exert pressure on the government to take this issue seriously and make it a top policy priority. If the government feels it is being held accountable by an informed and aware electorate, it will be forced to act and deliver.

If we want to enjoy that sweet scent of jasmine carried on the summer breeze, this may be the best way forward.

Narmeen Hamid is a physician by training and has a master's in public health and a doctorate in social medicine from the United Kingdom.

This article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Chinese delegations are descending upon Pakistan in droves and then being taken to Chinese restaurants here. Makes sense right? Make them feel right at home. Share in their cuisine, break the ice. Start talks about China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on a positive note. The most positive note being a Yuan.

Only, the Chinese have never seen Chinese food like this before. 

What we call Chinese food is basically just a slightly tangy way of making the same things we have always been making. Chicken in rice, chicken draped in sauce, chicken in soup, chicken in noodles, chicken in chicken itself. Because why not. 

We like fried things in Lahore. We fry everything, we fry our oil too. The Chinese prefer boiled and steamed food, so tensions will escalate quickly.  

Growing up I thought the Chinese ate drumsticks and spring rolls all day. Like if one family in Beijing visited another they would be served spring rolls and kept being asked to have more. “You haven’t even eaten anything. Please try the egg fried rice, I made it myself.” 

But, disappointingly, this never happens.

Because of these misnomers, my knowledge of Chinese soup was just hot and sour. Other than when I ordered it over Foodpanda; then it was usually cold and sour.

Occasionally, when my father couldn’t handle spices, we had chicken corn soup. But none of us particularly liked it. Too bland — we kept wondering how the Chinese had this at all. It was something you should give as broth to a sick person. Not serve at a restaurant.

Chicken drumsticks then made their way to local bakeries. Gigantic balls of meat laced with bread, fried and stuffed around a bone. Delicious to me because it was like spicy chargha. But the Chinese have never seen them before and probably don’t want to see them again.

And maybe Manchurian is from Manchester as well? Because it isn’t from China. Egg fried rice and Chicken Manchurian are the staples of our version of Chinese cuisine. Whenever someone says let us have Chinese it almost always involves rice and Manchurian. I wonder how many times Chinese officials say no to it before caving in and saying yes.

This culinary confusion could spoil all our economic plans. Nobody can change the fate of a people on an empty stomach. They need their food. And we are about to make it for them.

Chinese street food has already landed here. There was a man in Islamabad selling dumplings from a cart, like you would Afghani fries or bun kebabs. He made quite a splash on social media.

Bubble tea, dim sum, Kung Pao, hot pots, noodle soup are all finding their way to restaurants, groceries stores and takeaways. They are going mainstream. Just as Mandarin classes are starting all over Pakistan.

Authentic Chinese food places also sell alcohol on their premises.

Stories are breaking out about new liquor shops being licensed in Lahore. One potentially at the Lahore airport itself where the Chinese need alcohol most, to survive the first few days of Lahore. They are not used to breathing smog. 

Duty free alcohol would make sure they don’t have to travel to the hotels on The Mall to pick up booze. Or pay exorbitant money to bootleggers.

Having said all that, in the long run, I think the Chinese should let us colonise their platter rather than the other way around. I have had authentic Chinese food and it tastes bland. One day the Chinese are going to realise that they have been doing their own food wrong for years. 

But appropriating someone’s cuisine is a two-way street. I really want to see what the Chinese can do with nihari.

The writer was previously a staffer at the Herald.

The article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

When the first train pulled into Quetta in March 1887, it did not roll the way they do today up the stony bends of the Bolan Pass. Instead, the line struck north from Sibi into the 160-kilometre-long meandering gorge of the Nari River through the sulphur-stained badlands of Gandakeen Aaf (sulphur water in Balochi) past such evocative names as Tanduri that is still famous for its furnace summer heat and into the cool highlands of Harnai and Shahrag. In those days when the Great Game had reached a frenzied pitch, the line that dreamed of reaching Kandahar was called the Kandahar State Railway.

Northwest of Harnai lay Khost and beyond it the dramatic yawning maw of the Chhappar Rift. But the rift is a tale of glorious achievement and woe so far as railway engineers of that time were concerned. Suffice it to say that it was put out of service by a summer rainstorm in July 1942. By then the line through the Bolan Pass was in place and passenger trains entering the Nari Gorge went only as far as Khost while coal trains trundled on another 15 kilometres to the mines of Zardalu.

When Pakistan Railway had not yet fallen into the paws of political worthies who believed railways could be easily replaced by road transport, we were still operating most of the 1,400 railway stations the country had inherited from the British Raj. Then there was a daily train service out from Sibi in the morning and back in from Khost in the evening.

I first rode this line in 1986. I had no business being on the train or anywhere it was going except that, having read a very interesting book, Couplings to the Khyber by P S A Berridge I merely wanted to see the line. From Sibi to somewhere near Kuchali, the country belonged to Marri Baloch tribespeople: silent and grim, the men with jet-black hair and whiskers cradled their well cared for rifles and preened themselves, curling up their dark moustaches to sharp points. As one of them and his wife got off at some station, I asked where he lived. Wordlessly, he waved an expansive hand in the direction of the sombre, coffee-coloured hills in the east. I watched him and his young wife stride off into the thicket of acacia trees and before the train set off again, they had disappeared from view.

Thereafter, it was Pashtun country: boisterous and garrulous, they had endless questions. Their everlasting surprise was that I had come all the way from Karachi only to ride the train to the end of the line and return the same way before sundown. They threw their heads back and laughed at me, “Levanai sarrhay de” – mad man – they told each other between guffaws.

After the outbreak of the Second Afghan War in 1879, the British did not want the secret out concerning their strategic railway link between Chaman and Kandahar so, even as they carried on building it, they named it as The Harnai Road Improvement Scheme. Secrets have the bad habit of becoming known and the enemy to thwart was Tsarist Russia that was fast expanding into Central Asia. And so to speed up the construction without the cover of secrecy, the new name given to the project was The Sind Peshin State Railway.

When Raj engineers were building this line in the 1880s, summer heat and fear of imperial Russia were not their only enemies. The Marris routinely raided the building parties to kill and plunder.

Leaving Sibi, the line crossed the meandering Nari River six times to reach Babar Kach. On my 1986 outing, we clattered along at a leisurely pace to cover the 83-kilometre distance to Khost in eight hours. That was just as well for I got the feel of the country and, as we halted at one of the stations, I saw a team of surveyors resting in the shade of the building. What gave me goosebumps and transported me back to that heroic age of exploration was their equipment: theodolite and plane table. That was long before satellite imagery became commonplace and killed all the excitement of the wild, uncharted places of our planet and the thrill of putting them on the map.

Khost station at the end of the line was another world: a pitched roof mud plastered building, decrepit and uncared for. In the background, another smaller but similar building stood forlorn. And way back below the cloudless sky were stark brown hills. Two regulation signs, one at either end of the platform, carried the name of the station in Urdu and English together with its height above sea: 1,255 metres. Everything was covered with a miasma of coal dust from the endless handling of coal coming from the mines of Zardalu.

The station master was a Mansehra native caught in Balochistan from the time of One Unit, he said. There were no paved roads here, he pointed out. Below Harnai, it was camel country if there were no trains. If ever a railway line was a lifeline, it was this connecting Sibi with Khost, he said with visible pride. Over tea, he pointed out of his window to the little knoll across the coal-blackened siding and suggested I should check out the graveyard before leaving.

“Take your time,” he said as I was leaving, “I’ll hold the train for you.”

There were several graves, mostly of soldiers. Two caught my attention: Sarah Nicholas and her brother Stefan. Neither child crossed their fourth birthday and both died within a few months of each other in 1898. The gravestones had English, Urdu and another writing that I had then erroneously taken to be Cyrillic (which it wasn’t). Over the years, I have tried to learn more about these children and their unfortunate parents but no railway literature has anything on them.

On the return journey to Sibi, I made friends with the locomotive driver and rode the footplate all the way back to get a good look at the bridges. Painted the prescription liver red, they were magnificent spans of steel. Thereafter I took several trips up and down this line, always just for the heck of being there.

In 1999, I took four European railway enthusiasts by road to Khost. I was shocked to see the graveyard vandalised. The soldiers’ tombstones lay smashed. Little Stefan’s steel sarcophagus had been stolen for its weight while the marble plaque on Sarah’s upright brick monument was partially broken. America had won the jihad against Soviet Russia and in its aftermath a new Islam was born in Afghanistan and Pakistan that was soon to spread across the world.

After 1999, came a long hiatus. In 2007, word came that a military dictator’s folly had been matched in equal measure by Baloch tribesmen. For the dastardly murder of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, his followers blew up the bridges of the Nari Gorge. If the graveyard vandalism had left me heartbroken, now I was utterly devastated.

On a stormy evening in March 2009, I was in Sibi to take a railway trolley up the line to see how far I could get across the destroyed bridges. We put-putted out under storm lighting with the sun low in the east. In all my outings, I had never seen the Nari in such glorious pastel colours. As we came up to the first destroyed bridge, the railway gang operating the trolley said it had rained very heavily earlier in the morning in the headwaters of the Nari and we would be well advised to retreat before the river rose. Failing that, we would be stranded in the middle of the great outback with nowhere to go.

Wading across the knee-deep river, we hurriedly marched across the other side to reach the next bridge. More heartbreak. Beyond the third damaged bridge lay the deserted station of Tanduri. As we pottered about the place, I wondered why Italian film-maker Sergio Leone had never thought of making his spaghetti westerns here. And then the shout came: “The river is rising.”

We ran to the first crossing which was fine. At the second, I asked if the escorting militiaman could order the river to flow backward. At the third, we were chest deep in milk-coffee water. I held my camera bag aloft as we carefully threaded our way to the far side where the trolley waited. Thankfully, the whole episode passed uneventfully.

Later in Sibi, I met an elderly Marri Baloch and I asked him why would they destroy such beautiful pieces of engineering and architecture. The man was livid. He said they were all thankless people. They rode the train from end to end for negligible fare. Mostly they did not even pay that. Now they shell out a 100 rupees apiece to get a ride on a tractor trolley. And then they have to walk for hours to Sibi.

Recently, I caught the rumour about the Nari bridges having been repaired. They indeed have, confirm my railway friends and, though the line is up, it is not running. “Too much insecurity,” I was informed.

Of all the railway journeys in Pakistan it was the Sibi-Khost section that raised goosebumps as the train thundered over the Nari bridges and through the pastel hills of the gorge. On a June afternoon in Tanduri one was swamped with anxiety: what if the locomotive broke down? Where and how would one find succour? And in midwinter, the dry chill of Harnai ran through one’s bones as one espied the distant hills show off their mantles of new snow. This was not a line to travel on to get anywhere; it was and may one day again be a line to take you places that exist in wild imaginations even without going anywhere.

The author is a travel writer and photographer.

The article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Since the Aurat March happened a few weeks ago, Pakistan has seen two Hindu girls abducted for conversions/marriages and there is a harrowing domestic abuse case simmering in Lahore where a woman refused to dance for her husband's friends, at his insistence, and was then beaten and humiliated.

All this, days after detractors questioned whether a women's solidarity movement was at all needed. And isn't feminism against our culture, they asked? Well if our culture is rape, mutilation and ownership of women's bodies then feminism is against our culture, yes.

Meanwhile a cleric issued what was practically a fatwa endorsing sexual assault against these marching women because they have the audacity to demand their basic human rights.

These aren't empty threats either. It doesn't matter if the cleric himself is picked up or restrained; what he has uttered is venom that will now seep into misogynistic heads. I was in the middle of writing this piece when a student did that very thing in the context of blasphemy. He stabbed his professor to death because Islam was apparently imperiled. He decided to take it upon himself to do what his Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan preacher enjoined upon all his followers to do. Take lives.

But sure, this country is perfectly safe for women as the public relations facelift and white validation agent Cynthia D Ritchie wants to demonstrate; she was photographed cycling in Peshawar - presumably accompanied by armed protocol and possibly a tank - and she was looking ecstatic (but not looking at the road, safety first lady).

It has been a lot to process, so let's start small shall we. People of my gender; men, for lack of a better word; I know testosterone fuels a lot of the things we do, but I'm fairly certain it doesn't clog eardrums. For a few days every year, it's okay to listen, give the mouth a much needed rest.

Why am I writing about the Aurat March then? It's not my place to say what problems women are or are not facing, after all. To mansplain them. But what I wish to talk about is the reaction from men themselves that has been petrifyingly bad.

We have had Amir Liaquat, Orya Maqbool Jaan and even film star Shaan go on bizarre rants against the Aurat March for putting our Islamic society in peril. Then, of course, we had the 'there should be a Mard March' crowd. I am all for a Mard March really. As long as they march into the ocean and never come back.

Other reactionary complaints include decrying vulgar placards. This one is relatively straight forward. Shame and decency are cultural constructs and the culture here is patriarchy. You can't fight a culture while still obeying its rules. So the resistance has to be vulgar.

And how exactly does one make a placard against unsolicited pictures of male genitalia without mentioning male genitalia? Men send pictures of a specific organ; not premature baldness, not overgrown chest hair, one specific thing. There is literally no other way to talk about those pictures.

Having genitalia flung in your face isn't a minor issue either. The first time someone told me she had seen a man at a busy signal undo his shalwar and proceed to masturbate in front of her, I wasn't shocked at the perversion; we all know perverts exist; what was shocking was that this was broad daylight. This was a Monday afternoon. This was normal.

There is no polite way to talk about unpaid domestic labour either. What are the polite things women are supposed to write? I can teach you how to use an iron? A microwave? How to throw both socks in the same direction? That placard itself would be unpaid labour.

Oh, there's also criticism that making dinner or squabbling over socks are benign problems. Why talk about these when there are much 'bigger' issues to address? I don't think these things can be looked at in isolation. It's all additive; hundreds of domestic duties which are taken for granted as women's performative functions pave the way for bigger problems. Foster the culture for them. So, unlike the aforementioned male genitalia, there is no issue that is too small.

No transgression that is too minor.

Does all of this sound suspiciously feminist? Don't worry I have never made claims to being one. I don't think men can call themselves feminists. At least not yet. Not now. We can be allies at best, or more accurately the men who try not adding to the existing problems.

Male privilege isn't selective. It exists even when you try to opt out of it, because the way people's behaviour and perception is affected by your gender is not in your control. I live in a bubble of male privilege and it's still very easy to stay mostly silent and live out a comfortable, privileged existence.

Also, becoming a baseline non-douchey human being is nothing to thump one’s chest about. Nobody should wear this like a badge of honour.

Men my age aren't the woke generation. A couple of generations down from here they'll have internalised personal boundaries and how not to address women and so on. For this generation our progressiveness is learned behaviour. Learning from these very women at these marches.

When the Meesha Shafi sexual harassment case broke out, men had similar reactions as the Aurat March ones. One Hamza Ali Abbasi tweeted asking where to draw the line between flirting and harassment. He probably meant that as a rhetorical question but unwittingly he has stumbled upon an important consideration (even a stopped clock is right twice a day); men do have to relearn everything they know about personal space and the behaviour that they should not be exhibiting.

Women have always known what harassment is, we haven't. Still don't. I can think back on my life and catch transgressions too. I don't put myself up on a pedestal. I don't have the knees to climb up onto a pedestal anyway.

I went to an all-boys school. I can't even begin to explain the ways boys think about gender and sexuality. What they think about women. Boys that grow up to be men.

I do try to unlearn my toxic attitudes but there is no way to erase the almost three decades of conditioning in a handful of years. I make mistakes. I say horrible things.

The only thing men my age and above has is relative morality. "At least I'm not as bad as him". "At least I didn't do that". This will change in future generations of men, and accomplishing that is what these women are marching for. To start long lasting conversations that span the ages.

Nobody let's go of their privilege without a fight and these women are that fight. So please don't belittle their efforts with what aboutery like poverty, war or western cultural imperialism.

I wish I could say we men are smarter than that, but that wouldn't be true.

The writer was previously a staffer at the Herald.

The ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) inherited an economy that had been showcased as a success story by its predecessor government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN). The previous government would claim that the national economy had been revived and economic activity had been put on the path for a higher and sustainable growth.

The reality was different. The PMLN’s economic edifice was built on very weak macroeconomic foundations. Heavy dependence on foreign loans and short-term borrowing as well as stagnant exports had caused a foreign exchange financing gap of near 30 billion US dollars, almost 10 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This gap stared in the face of PTI’s economic team whose immediate primary task after coming into power became to raise foreign funding in order to save the economy from financial collapse and bankruptcy. Thanks to help from friendly countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, most recently, China, the team was able to raise sizeable foreign exchange. It similarly managed to obtain concessions on payments for oil imports — also from Saudi Arabia. This helped Pakistan ward off an imminent economic crisis and provided some cushion to our fast declining foreign exchange reserves.

While the government was seeking help from friendly countries, many analysts worried that it was taking too much time to go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a financial-assistance package. Prime Minister Imran Khan, indeed, was not keen, at least initially, on approaching the IMF because he had pledged to reduce Pakistan’s dependence on external financing and the conditionalities that came with such financing. The government, nevertheless, decided to bite the bullet despite strong divisions on the issue among its team of economic advisers.

In the first few months of being in office, the government tried to negotiate with the IMF on a three-year assistance programme worth 8-9 billion US dollars. During these negotiations, the Pakistani team faced an IMF that was upset because all the previous governments – starting in the 1990s – had gone back on their promises to carry out economic reforms in return for aid packages.

The government negotiators found that the IMF wanted to put in very harsh terms and conditions for a new assistance programme. These included further devaluation of Pakistani currency, an end to the practice of using the State Bank of Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves – built mainly through foreign borrowing – to support the rupee’s value, drastic decrease in energy and fuel subsidies to reduce the mounting circular debt, sharp tightening of monetary policy (that is, increase in interest rates), a significant decline in Public Sector Development Programme to reduce fiscal deficit and the privatisation of major loss-making state-owned enterprises. The IMF wanted the government to commit to – and initiate – all these measures at the very outset.

Pakistan’s economic managers, led by finance minister Asad Umar, decided that taking these measures immediately was too high a cost to pay as these would “subject the people of Pakistan to unbearable hardship”.

They, therefore, sought a relatively gradual process of economic reforms — something that the IMF did not agree to. The government, however, did not close its parleys with the IMF. A process of discussion has continued for the last few months and has now reached a stage where the two sides are again talking about the possibility of the approval of a financial package sooner rather than later.

The decision to not succumb to the IMF’s harsh conditionalities was certainly a bold one but it needed to be complemented by some other important steps. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s economic team, on the contrary, did not realise the importance of undertaking a quick and decisive, but also well-thought-through, short-term programme for the stabilisation of the economy in order to restore business confidence and ensure that economic growth did not stumble downwards. After displaying an understanding of the economy’s underlying ailments, his team appears to have come up with somewhat simplistic solutions to deep-rooted problems. At times, it has made even conflicting economic decisions.

This was most clearly displayed in the government’s approach towards the private sector. At one stage, its economic managers made it clear that private businesses will be the major engine of capital accumulation and job generation, and will be fully encouraged to undertake this task by freeing them from unnecessary controls and bureaucratic interference.

Yet, at the same time, the government set in motion a strong and overzealous drive by revenue authorities to not just bring habitual tax evaders into the tax net but also to pressurise the existing taxpayers — at times unfairly. Resultantly, it has failed on both fronts. Neither did the private sector respond positively to its friendly overtures nor were its policies successful in bolstering tax revenues significantly.

Similar is the case with the mini-budget presented by finance minister Umar at the end of January 2019. Here we see a classic case of a government trying to please everyone but ending up in pleasing no one. The move to withdraw some of the tax concessions on salary income given by the previous government was perhaps justified given Pakistan’s current fiscal position (where the gap between income and expenditure has been increasing consistently).

Similarly, the removal of high tariffs on the import of industrial raw materials was an important and much-needed step to increase the international competitiveness of local manufacturers. The revenue measures proposed in the mini-budget – and now approved by the National Assembly – were, however, certainly not sufficient to meet the revenue needs. Similarly, the planned cuts in government expenditure to decrease the burgeoning fiscal deficit were also not clearly spelt out. The IMF, for one, was not impressed.

The other flaw in the economic management has been a continuing uncertainty about currency exchange rate and foreign exchange reserves. Though the State Bank of Pakistan has been able to stabilise the exchange rate at around 140 rupees to a US dollar, many potential investors fear that the value of rupee will drop further – perhaps quite significantly – once an agreement is signed with the IMF. Such an agreement will preferably seek a free-floating exchange rate system. Short of that, the IMF will want to put a drastic limit on the State Bank of Pakistan’s ability to intervene in the currency market. Many potential investors have, therefore, decided to wait till an agreement materialises.

As far as foreign reserves are concerned, dollar deposits given by Saudi Arabia, UAE and China have, indeed, given them a semblance of stability but these deposits have limited utility because these cannot be used for loan repayments or for foreign trade. Similarly, a rising dependence on imported natural gas for electricity generation has reduced oil imports and blunted the impact of concessions given by Saudi Arabia through deferred oil payments.

The reserves, in the meanwhile, continue to bleed by an amount ranging between 750 million and 1 billion US dollars every month. This haemorrhage is resulting from not just a high import bill but is also caused by payments being made to service foreign debts. What we have borrowed from our friends will certainly do nothing significant to ward off the twin impact of these two factors.

The overall economic situation reflects how the government has handled – or mishandled – various challenges. That the GDP growth rate is expected to drop – from 5.2 per cent recorded in 2017-18 to 3.5-4 per cent in 2018-19 – suggests there has been some break in the growth momentum achieved earlier.

The fiscal deficit, on the contrary, is expected to rise higher — to over 6 per cent of the federal budget at the end of 2018-19. And, though the current account deficit has narrowed in recent weeks – more due to a lull in imports than because of any significant increase in exports – considerable pressure still exists on foreign exchange reserves for bridging the gap between low export earnings and high foreign exchange requirements for imports and debt servicing.

Most worryingly, there has been a spurt in inflation primarily because of rupee devaluation which has raised prices of imported goods, significantly increased natural gas prices and, to a lesser extent, pushed up electricity rates (which have also risen due to reduction in subsidies).

Because businesses are setting prices for their products through a ‘cost-plus’ formula (due to uncertainty over foreign exchange rates), the knock-on effect of this pricing formula on non-tradable goods – such as construction and transportation, etc – means that the overall annual rate of inflation could be 8-10 per cent at the end of the current financial year on June 30, 2019. This will put pressure on the low income groups and those already living below the poverty line will immediately need a government-provided safety net.

The first major test of the government’s economic team in the coming months will be the upcoming round of negotiations with the IMF. Given that this team has been in office for more than half a year now, it is expected to be better prepared for this round of negotiations. Its task has been made somewhat easier because the government has already implemented some of the reforms demanded by the IMF in order to soften their blow on the economy and poor segments of the society — although the IMF will clearly ask for more. These mainly include adjustments in fuel and energy prices through reduction in subsidies.

That the foreign exchange rate is already well near where it should be also makes life easy for the economic team during its negotiations with the IMF. Now it must try to ensure that the rate is not subjected to any significant decline.

It must also convince the IMF that fiscal deficit is brought down gradually so that sharp cuts in development expenditure and steep increases in taxes do not completely break the momentum for economic growth. It should, similarly, agree on achievable revenue generation targets rather than the ones which it cannot attain. Above all, the government must seek an increase in the amount of money allocated for the Benazir Income Support Programme and other social welfare initiatives, including housing for the poor — and keep this money outside the fiscal deficit targets.

The economic managers should, however, accept the IMF’s contention that a greater autonomy is given to the State Bank of Pakistan in setting currency exchange rates and managing the monetary policy. As long as the bank’s own monetary policy committee has an autonomous status and as long as there are frequent meetings of the committees that coordinate between the bank and the government, this autonomy should not hurt the economy. There, though, is a need to make this consultative process more inclusive by enabling the participation of provincial governments in it.

The biggest challenge for our economic policymakers is to ensure that the stabilisation phase following the introduction of economic reforms is not prolonged (even if its sharp impact cannot be avoided in the immediate term). The other part of this challenge consists of the need to take the economy to a growth rate of 5.5-6 per cent in the next three years.

With China-Pakistan Economic Corridor entering a phase where new economic zones will be set up and with electricity shortages having been drastically reduced, Pakistan is well placed to attract private investment. Simultaneously, foreign and domestic investors are showing a high interest in the country’s large and growing market and a fast rising middle class. Together these factors should help Pakistan achieve an even higher growth rate.

We must, in the end, realise that recurring foreign exchange constraints are the reason why Pakistan’s GDP growth rate does not reach the level it has the potential to reach and why we continue to have start-stop cycles of economic development. To overcome these constraints, exports should be placed at the centre of a new growth strategy. Rather than trying an arbitrary slowdown in imports, economic managers should make policies that encourage exports. Finally, we should realise that Pakistan is required to aim for a sustained growth rate of 7.5-8 per cent if it is to meet all its security needs as well as the needs of its people.

The writer is a professor of economics at the Lahore School of Economics.

This article was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Violence is not unique to Islam. Almost all religions have violent strands though there are no recent historical parallels to the violence being perpetrated in the name of Islam. Similar is the case with seminaries which are part of all religions but, since 9/11, only Islamic madrasas have been branded as nurseries of terrorists.

There are several reasons for the current prevalence of violence in Islam. These include the actual or perceived historical injustices in places like Kashmir and Palestine, and even the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate a hundred years ago. These developments have generated a sense of marginalisation and frustration – and consequently extremist tendencies – among Muslims.

Yet, we must acknowledge that the rise of violent Islam is a relatively recent phenomenon. None of the many militant organisations that sprang up in Europe after World War II were Islamic. Even in the 1980s, only two out of 64 militant groups operating in different parts of the world had religious motivations. This changed only in the 1990s when 26 out of 56 militant organisations operating worldwide were religiously motivated. A majority of them claimed Islam to be their guiding force.

Rise of Islamic militancy can be attributed to the flourishing of the Persian Gulf’s Sunni economies, particularly that in Saudi Arabia, in the 1970s and an Islamic revolution in Shia Iran in 1979. Together, the two developments resulted in proxy sectarian wars in places such as Pakistan. The taking over of government in Islamabad by a religious zealot and military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, in 1977, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 only added to the mêlée.

Military rulers and right wing politicians in Pakistan have continued to patronise militant activities of extremist Islamic organisations since then. Even liberal political parties looked the other way as foreign powers and Pakistan’s security establishment used these militants as proxies in regional and global conflicts. In due course, nationalist and subnationalist militant organisations also emerged in the country owing, partly if not entirely, to the deteriorating security situation.

In recent times, Pakistan has proscribed some militant organisations and their members under pressure from global powers and international regulatory authorities. Proscription, though, has had little impact on the activities of these organisations. This is mainly because the laws enacted – including the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) 1997 – and the initiatives taken – such as the National Action Plan formulated in December 2014 – for curbing their activities have never been implemented in letter and spirit.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a growing realisation among the ruling class that the policy of nurturing, patronising and appeasing religious militant organisations was flawed and would not work any longer. But reversing these decades-long covert and, at times, overt policies overnight is neither feasible nor desirable.

There are always apprehensions that militant organisations could react with violence if and when a strict action is taken against them. These misgivings are certainly not misplaced though recent history has proved that these could be exaggerated in Pakistan’s case. Recent crackdowns against the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, an anti-blasphemy extremist organisation, and the lack of any reaction from its supposedly ‘huge support base’ is a case in point.

Considered an uncontrollable monster at one point, its cadres have simply withered away even though its leaders have now spent months in detention. Recent proscription of Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation and the crackdown on Jaish-e-Muhammad have been, similarly, met with a whimper.

While the state must guard against disproportionate actions against militant and proscribed organisations, legal instruments – such as the provisions of ATA – must be implemented as a first step to curtail their presence and activities. A careful reading of ATA would reveal that it is a very comprehensive piece of legislation. Problem, though, is the huge gap between the intent of the law and its application on the ground — something that the Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog on money laundering and terrorism financing, has all along been lamenting about. ATA has always been used in crimes of usual nature.

Often, it has been also deployed for the victimisation of political opponents but it has never been invoked against militant organisations because, for most of our recent past, we needed these entities for political purposes — for utilising their vote bank or for deploying them as proxies. Sympathisers of these organisations, including some members of the state apparatus, have been giving them the benefit of doubt for these very reasons. Many people rather have eulogised their social, charitable and welfare activities but, in the process, have missed the bigger picture altogether.

We must bear in mind that we need to take action against militant organisations not just under global pressures or for meeting requirements of the international regulatory authorities but for the sake of Pakistan’s own survival. It must also be clear to all of us that the problems created by militant entities can only be resolved through legal means.

Attempts at deradicalising the members of these organisations, being carried out or sponsored by the security establishment, are certainly being done in good faith but they remain half-baked in their conception and fruitless in their implementation. Opening and running occasional deradicalisation centres will not prevent or counter radicalisation in the society.

Evidence from other parts of the world suggests that the tendency to use shortcuts never allows deradicalisation efforts to be significantly successful. This is as true in places such as Egypt – which has a long history of violent Islamic extremism – as it is in states like the United Kingdom which, in recent years, has run many deradicalisation programmes to little avail.

As a starting point, we must identify the nature and causes of radicalisation in Pakistan. To do that, we need research carried out by genuine researchers and think tanks, and not by security or intelligence agencies. Research teams specifically selected for the purpose should be given free access to all stakeholders, particularly to terrorists and militants. Once their findings are received, we could start plugging the holes identified by them.

Mainstreaming militant organisations should be the next step. It is not a novel idea. A number of countries have mainstreamed militant organisations of various ideologies. The most successful example in this regard is the Irish Republican Army, a separatist group once fighting against the British rule over Northern Ireland. It has transformed itself into a political party over the last decade and a half.

Nepal’s former Maoist guerilla fighters are also now a part of the government after having won votes to reach the country’s parliament. Many warring factions in Cambodia’s civil war, similarly, have become electoral contenders. Most recently, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – or FARC – have forsworn violence and decided to take part in democratic politics.

We, however, must understand that mainstreaming is the process of reorienting a terrorist or militant organisation through negotiations and talks. The process involves convincing them to change their behavioural patterns and organisational outlook. Such convincing only works if it is followed by a formal peace accord or some kind of a charter of reconciliation involving all stakeholders.

This accord or charter should include terms and conditions for decommissioning the members of militant organisations, and provide for a legal and judicial amnesty for their past activists in exchange for a commitment to stay away from all types of violence.

This process also requires the state to allow militant organisations some space to operate before they could transform themselves. They will definitely take time before reorienting themselves into welfare/social entities or political parties. Throughout this time, though, the state must remain conscious of the formation of splinter groups that could likely continue as militant entities.

Most importantly, the process of mainstreaming must not start without Parliament’s involvement. Parliament, in fact, must take ownership of it. After an open debate, the legislature should devise a consensus strategy applicable to all militant organisations. Political environment will be further damaged if the process is carried out selectively and without a parliamentary oversight.

If the state clearly defines its policy, it has multiple instruments of power at its disposal – including different law enforcing agencies, legal and judicial institutions, and constitutional authority – to enforce that policy. And if it spells out its goals publicly, majority of the population will back its efforts. In the ongoing counterterrorism efforts, the state has already proved that there is nothing that it cannot achieve if it uses its powers judiciously.

We must not forget that extremism and radicalisation cannot be countered through kinetic – read security – measures alone. The process also requires soft interventions in the form of legislation and policies. Most importantly, there has to be sustained implementation of laws and policies that inform the state’s actions which, in turn, should not only be transparent and fair under the law of the land but also must be verifiable and sustainable. Certain state institutions may encounter capacity issues in implementing and sustaining counter militancy policies but their capacity could be enhanced easily through training, and by seeking help and support of international partners.

Time certainly is right for initiating measures to rid Pakistan of religious militancy and violent extremism. People are highly weary of terrorism in the country. We, therefore, must embark on a comprehensive deradicalisation and mainstreaming programme — not because the world wants us to start one but because it is a necessary condition for our country’s survival as a place at peace with itself and others.

This article was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

If you can prevent your blood pressure from jumping up and down, the history book I am going to write about can provide you with all the shocks one expects in a cheap detective thriller. But first, something about the scope for the study of history, as determined by our learned policy-makers.

When the hated British were ruling our land history - forget the alien rulers' view of it - was taught as a compulsory subject in high schools. One had to study not only all the periods of the country's history - the ancient and Hindu, the Muslim and the British - but also quite a detailed history of England. Now, thanks to independence, history is not taught as a separate subject in schools. (The compulsory subject described as Pakistan Studies certainly does not fall in the category of history.) Thus, history is introduced a a subject of study in Intermediate classes.

The students have a choice between two options. First: History of Pakistan (1707-1973 A.P.) and History of the Muslim World (1800 to 1956 A.D.)· Second: History of the Sultans and the Mughals (71 A.D. to 1707 A.D.) and History of Islam Holy Prophet Khulafa-i-Rashideen 70 and the Ummayyads. Clearly, for college students intending to study the history of their own country, the millennia before 712 A.D. when Mohammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, is not considered relevant at all.

At the moment however, we are concerned with the history of Pakistan, for which the syllabus is laid down by the federal authorities. The Handbook of Curricula and Syllabi for the Intermediate Examination, 1984, to be held by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Lahore, defines twenty-three chapter headings. In accordance with this syllabus, history books are written by teachers or by hacks and published under teachers' names. The Board does make suggestions as to which books the students may follow but the teachers have their own preferences. Thus, quite a few textbooks have been compiled by influential teachers and different books are recommended by teachers on the basis of their connections.

One of the most widely recommended books is 'Tarikh-i-Pakistan' by Mohammad Abdullah Malik, M.A., described as Head of the Department of History, Government Islamia College, Railway Road Lahore, which provides as good an idea as any of the kind of history that our youth are taught. The book has all the 23 chapter-headings given in the syllabus plus three more, bringing it up to the end of 1977.

That the book suffers from the usual flaws that mar Pakistani textbooks - poor and car~less calligraphy, indifferent reading of proofs, names missing or misspelt, illegible maps, etc - is a sad but relatively unimportant matter. A more disturbing feature is the adoption of journalese for assessing history and a contempt for linguistic propriety amazing in a textbook. Some random samples:

'Ullu seedha karna' is a favourite expression with the author. One of the causes of the failure of the 1857 uprising was that "Pak-o-Hind ke rahnuna mushtarika maqasid ki khatir jang na lar rahey thai. Har shakhs apna ulla seedha karney ki fikr main tlha". (The leaders of Pakistan and India did not have shared war objectives. Everybody had his own axe to grind.)

"Sikandar Mirza ney Muslim League ki kamyabi ko apney iqtidar kay liyay khatra samjha. Chunanche apna ullu seedha karney ke liye jan boojh ker jalson aur jalooson ko nakam kiya jata raha." (Sikandar Mirza considered the Muslim League's success a threat to his rule. Therefore to gain his personal objective the failure of meetings and procession was manipulated.)

The language one finds here is of the same order as semi-literate, loose journalistic piece. For example: "Sir Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah ko Congress kay haath lagey huai thay" (had been roughly treated by Congress).

"Congres kay pithuon ne khauf-o-hiras (terror spread by Congress stooges).

ln the 1965 war, India "ki fauji taqat ka kachoomar nikal gaya" (military power was disgraced).

Even these deviations from propriety of expression pale into insignificance when one takes note of the omissions. Since the book is apparently a collection of essays on the subject mentioned in the syllabus, there are many gaps in what would be considered essential to the continuity of history. ln the 458-page book, Moenjodaro and Harappa are not mentioned even once. There are brief notes on the pre-1947 history of Punjab Sindh and the NWFP, but Balochistan is totally ignored. There is a review of the cultural legacy of the Mughal but nothing about the culture of the Pakistani people.

The progress of languages and literature under the Mughal and the British is recorded, but there is not a word about post-1947 development. The reader of this book would not know what languages are spoken in Pakistan. In this history of our people between 1707 and 1947, the world war and their impact on the subcontinent do not figure. During the long freedom struggle only two parties are discussed - Congress and Muslim League. There is no account of other parties, including the Khaksars, Ahrars Khudai Khidmatgars, etc., or of peasant and workers' organisation. No mention of Bhagat Singh, or INA or even the naval ratings' revolt!

The author acknowledges his debt to a number of other authors but avoids primary source of history. It is thus natural that for the assessment of historical vents he depend on 'khulasa' writers of the earlier decade; one hardly comes across an independent or modem appreciation of the Mughal rule the policies of the British, or the travails of the people during the last three decades.

The most cavalierly written part of the book deals with the post-1947 period. Some examples: The Quaid-i -Azam receives summary treatment. His August 11, 1947, speech is ignored and the only reference to his views on the constitution is that in February 1948 he declared that the constitution would reflect democratic and Islamic values.

Khwaja Nazimuddin did not come up to expectations. Malik Ghulam Mohammad was a crafty and cunning man. No mention that Nazimuddin was dismissed or that the constituent Assembly was disbanded, or of the effect these vents had on the country's future.

About military pacts, the author says it is not possible for small nations to avoid joining one of the power blocs. By joining military pacts Pakistan adopted a positive and constructive policy as opposed to a merely negative and non-aligned policy. The 1954 defence pact with the USA solved defence problems but "one of the harmful results was that Pakistan began to be counted a a friend of the Anglo-American bloc. Russia, in particular was provoked and it started patting India's back. Thus, India staged a farce of its neutrality ... ". Seato was joined because "when China had successfully carried out its red revolution, its conquering push was directed towards south-east Asia. This posed a threat to the security of this region."

Although it is mentioned that Miss Fatima Jinnah opposed Ayub Khan in the presidential election, her consistent opposition to his undemocratic regime is not recorded. Only one of her speeches is quoted that of October 28 1958, in which she had wished the military ruler well! There is no objective assessment of the Ayub rule and the account is generally laudatory. The 1965 war ended in a victory for Pakistan. It ruined the economy of India and "people there started dying of starvation" while Pakistan's economic condition remained good.

The East Pakistan tragedy is dismissed in as much space as is allotted to Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam (the association running the college where the author served). The postponement of the Assembly session by Yahya Khan is not mentioned nor the farcical by elections which sealed the fate of Pakistan in 1971. Everything happened because of Sheikh Mujib's obduracy ('hadharmi '). Tikka Khan crushed the 'rebel elements' and only Hindu and those Bengalis who patronised Hindus escaped to India.

"Russia colluded with India because it wanted to use East Pakistan as a base against China." The paragraph under the subheading 'Effects (of the East Pakistan tragedy )' is a typical example of the text:

"As a result of this war (1971 ) East Pakistan was forever severed from Pakistan and Pakistan lost the distinction of being the largest Islamic state. East Pakistan was named Bangladesh and Indian plunder there gave rise to an economic crisis. More than 90,000 of Pakistan's soldiers were made prisoners of war. Their return became a problem for Pakistan. The new of the fall of Dacca fell on West Pakistan like a bolt of lightning. National prestige was wounded. Socialist elements came into the open and the country entered the most precarious phase."

There are scores of pages about the PPP regime and a long chapter on the 1973 constitution - a sheer waste of labour, it would seem. About the sacking of Balochistan and the NWFP ministries, the author says: "Bhutto government from the very beginning doubted these (NAP and JUI) leaders' loyalty to the country. Therefore when it learnt of their subversive activities, these ministries were abolished." (Mark the emphatic verdict of the author).

From page 379 to 382 the author writes approvingly of the reforms introduced during 1972-77, but things had changed by the time a new edition was required. A comment has been added:

" .... on paper these reforms appeared to be pleasing attractive and progressive. But they did not yield long-range results and soon the people rejected them, because instead of proving useful and conclusive these added to the suffering and hardships of the people. The land reforms gave birth to a confrontation between cultivators and the landlord class, as a result of which the cultivator class faced humiliating difficulties and had finally to seek compromise with the landlord class. Industrial reforms gave rise to an unending strife between the employer and the employee. The nationalisation of industrial units not only affected production but the standard of the products also fell. And worker became comfort-loving shirkers and impudent ('tan asan, kaam chor aur gustakh ho gaye') ... "

The description of events since 1977 makes one wonder if integrity and truthfulness are considered at all important. One is reminded of the girl who walked into a bookshop in the United State and wanted to buy a history of the American civil war written objectively from the southern point of view!

The discussion of foreign policy elicits quite a few interesting points. Under Ayub, Pakistan adopted the policy of seeking good relations with the Communist bloc. The policy continued til the Indo-Pak war of 1971. But this policy also did Pakistan no good. Rather, Pakistan lost a part - East Pakistan.

Writing about Pakistan-US relations, the author cannot resist the temptation to editorialise: "Ab America agar Pakistani awam ke saath khushgawar taluqqat barqarar rakhna chahta hai to usay Bharat ki fauji imdad bund kar deni chahiye." (If America now wishes to maintain good relations with the Pakistani people, it should stop giving military aid to India.)

The author is apparently not aware of Pakistan's policy of cultivating cordial relations with the Soviet Union. After condemning the Soviet role in the separation from East Pakistan the author observes: "Such events make it clear that Russia does not want to have close relations with Pakistan." Even after "this tragedy there has been no basic change in Russia's attitude towards Pakistan." "Russia did not like the creation of Pakistan on the basis of the Islamic code of life," etc.

I could go on regaling reader with tale after tale from this compendium of hilarities. No disrespect to Mr Malik i intended. He may well be one of the better teachers/writers of the lot. It is also possible to make a serious attempt to tell the historians a few basic principles of the discipline involved. But the thought that a Pakistani child's understanding of history depends on the textbooks should be enough to leave parents numb with apprehension.

This article was originally published in the Herald's April 1984 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It is not hard to kill a poet. You can use poisonous substances, bodies of water, unrequited love, five children, housework, or a vicious review. It is much harder to make a poet live. How blessed we are to be a largely illiterate but very literary country; in the days since Pashto poet and professor of literature Ibrahim Arman Luni died, our security state has done all it can to keep him alive in people’s imaginations.

Luni, a core committee member of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), died in Loralai after a protest on February 2, 2019. His supporters alleged police brutality. Parliamentarians affiliated to PTM were not allowed to attend his funeral in Balochistan. In the aftermath of his death, those asking why a poet was dead were arrested. The more privileged ones have since been released; others remain behind bars.

Recent attempts to ‘control the narrative’ around PTM are just the latest episodes in a cycle that began shortly after the creation of Pakistan: the insistence that the only story is the one the security state is telling. Not content to displace people from land, the security state, through censorship, has tried to make dissenting citizens become refugees from language itself.

When censorship has failed, there have been cover-ups, hobbled commissions, abductions and mysterious deaths. Recently, laws rubber stamped by our myopic parliamentarians, such as the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (which opens an umbrella of criminality over most expression) have been used to silence and intimidate. Two brothers in Multan protesting the death of Arman Luni were also booked under Section 290 of the Pakistan Penal Code which provides “punishment for public nuisance in cases not otherwise provided for”. Newspapers that do not toe the lines laid down have had their copies confiscated or their distribution blocked, and they have been financially pressured into running curated stories.

This is not just the opinion of ‘ghaddars’ or ‘foreign agencies’: the Supreme Court’s recent judgment on the Faizabad sit-in bears witness to law enforcement agencies and security agencies exceeding their mandates in “unconstitutional and illegal” ways and reminds them that they are paid to serve citizens and not the other way around.

Beyond the unconstitutional and illegal intrusions into the fundamental rights of Pakistani citizens, the crackdown on the coverage of PTM over the last year has also raised the issue of competence. Censoring a patch of text from papers available online, as was done with Manzoor Pashteen’s op-ed in The New York Times recently, suggests a profound lack of understanding of contemporary life. We live in an irrevocably connected world. To think that information can be withheld or erased from public consciousness implies a failure to adapt. The tragic killing of a family by the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) in Sahiwal in January this year illustrates why: the official story did not change because of a foreign agenda; the story changed because someone took a video on their cell phone. It also illustrates why Twitter has recorded a surge in requests to block accounts.

It is sad, but unsurprising, that social media is swamped with Pakistanis happy to troll other Pakistanis who want transparency and an end to abductions, extrajudicial killings or military courts. In politics, as in our families, most of us think daddy knows best. The paternalistic philosophy applied to an entire society over time results in the infantilisation of large swathes of the population. The imposed hierarchy in which the interests of some remain permanently foregrounded has been internalised; pait main daarhi (a beard hidden in one’s abdomen) should be updated to khopri main dictator (a dictatorial mindset).

But that is one side of the picture. The other side is that resistance to a destructive way of being has also been a constant in the history of our young country. Concerns about displacement from land, language and civilian ownership of collective identity are indigenous ones. Perhaps what makes PTM especially dangerous is the fact that it has the numbers and the capacity to grow. If it continues its adherence to non-violence and widens its inclusivity across gender and ethnicity, it has the potential to spark a full-blown civil rights movement.

We should all mourn a professor of literature in a society where guns are revered and words are outlawed. We should all challenge those who lack the imagination to see it as anything other than Good Poet (Iqbal) and Bad Poet (Luni).

The writer is the author of the novels Tunnel Vision, Survival Tips for Lunatics, Daddy's Boy and Rafina.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print

In the first two weeks after he assumed office, Chief Justice of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khosa has shown no intention of continuing the high-pitched, high-profile, media-dependent ‘activism’ his predecessor, Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, became known for. The reasons could include his personal disposition and, equally importantly, a desire to distinguish himself from his predecessor. This suggests that, given the absence of headline-grabbing judicial activism, the Supreme Court will be markedly different over the next 11 months from what it was till recently.

In this, Justice Khosa is more like Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani who succeeded Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as the chief justice in December 2013. He is known for his explicit reluctance to pursue judicial populism with the same frequency and intensity as his predecessor, even though his June 2014 judgment on the protection of minority rights stands like a landmark in Pakistan’s judicial landscape.

Another common factor between Justice Jillani and Justice Khosa is the shortness of their tenure in the exalted office — less than one year in each case. In his brief stint, Justice Jillani could not inculcate a lasting culture of judicial restraint at the Supreme Court. Will the court experience a return to the ethos of Justice Nisar’s era after Justice Khosa is gone is a question that is weighing on many minds. If that ethos does return, then high frequency judicial activism has certainly assumed a cyclical character.

The cycle began when the Supreme Court under Justice Chaudhry – between 2005 and 2013 – became known for an unorthodox work pattern marked by an unprecedented use of Article 184(3) of the 1973 Constitution that empowers the apex court to enforce constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights. This pattern defied most legal, judicial and constitutional interpretations of the said article and, thus, caused large-scale uncertainty and arbitrariness in adjudication in the apex court.

In an egregious invocation of the right to life, for instance, Justice Chaudhry took note of a memo allegedly delivered in May 2011 by Husain Haqqani, Islamabad’s ambassador in Washington DC at the time, to a former US military chief about the civil-military imbalance in Pakistan. To justify his action, Justice Chaudhry made national security an essential element of the people’s right to life.

In some other known instances, Justice Chaudhry went to the extent of fixing sugar prices and even staying the imposition of a Parliament-approved carbon tax. In what is perhaps the most significant exception that he made to judicial norms, he stopped just short of striking down those parts of the 18th Constitutional Amendment that sought to take away the absolute control over judicial appointments from the superior judiciary. The Supreme Court issued a short order in October 2010, requiring the legislature to make appropriate changes in the constitutional amendment so that control over judicial appointments remained with the superior judiciary. This was an unprecedented move — as was its aim: the court would not have to strike down the amendment, or parts thereof, if its suggestions made in the short order were approved by Parliament. It mattered little to the court that the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the power for even a judicial review of constitutional amendments, leave alone the power to dictate changes in them.

Justice Nisar, as a judge of the Supreme Court, was a signatory to the orders passed by the Chaudhry Court in both the memo case and the one involving judicial appointments. As the Chief Justice of Pakistan, he went even further and gave new form and meaning to the judicial review of parliamentary proceedings as well as the enforcement of fundamental rights under Article 184(3).

It is widely recognised by jurists that Article 184(3) does not give the Supreme Court the power to carry out a judicial review of actions taken by individuals in their private and personal capacity. In constitutional democracies the world over, this power is confined to a scrutiny of the state’s actions — and that too only in order to protect constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights. Justice Nisar disregarded this principle in at least two glaring instances: first in the actions he took against private hospitals for allegedly charging exorbitant fee from patients and, second, in the order he issued directing private schools to reduce their fee. Even though a case can be made to link the quality of a privately-provided service to its price (as is often done in consumer courts), both private hospitals and private schools in Pakistan are violating no laws of the land in charging the fee they charge. Significantly, consumer rights are not yet listed as a fundamental right in Pakistan’s Constitution and the Supreme Court, most certainly, is not a consumer court.

Justice Nisar also routinely issued directions to the federal and provincial governments while hearing cases under Article 184(3) on matters which, either by law or by the Constitution, fall outside the apex court’s purview. Just to cite one example, he practically ordered the imposition of a tax on groundwater extraction by companies selling bottled water. That the Constitution grants the power to levy a tax exclusively to the legislature – and not to any court – was not even argued and debated before him. Some other examples of a similar extension of judicial boundaries into the territories of other institutions include directions to the federal government to withdraw a tax on mobile phone use and the dissolution of the Punjab Healthcare Commission with the direction to form a new commission after having the names of its members approved by the court (read chief justice). In both cases, there are laid down rules and regulations that empower other institutions to impose a tax in the first instance and constitute a commission in the second.

As if all this was not enough, Justice Nisar also deemed it a legitimate exercise of judicial power to review the decision of posting a logo on the tail of Pakistan International Airline (PIA) planes and eventually order its removal.

A large part of Justice Nisar’s tenure as a member of the superior judiciary is said to have been marked by a textualist approach — seeing the role of the apex court strictly in terms of the text of the Constitution and the law. His opinion in the challenge to the 21st Constitutional Amendment is cited as an example to support this contention. All that changed in early 2018 — a year into his tenure as the chief justice.

In retrospect, his earlier views do not seem relevant to how his tenure as the chief adjudicator of the country eventually panned out. What is relevant here is that he got away with many judicial excesses despite the fact that disagreements with his rulings were fairly widespread among both jurists and outside observers. His ability to avoid an instant critique of his judgments is what should matter to us and worry us all.

It makes sense for Justice Khosa to choose to act differently from his predecessor as it did for Justice Chaudhry’s immediate successor. This may not necessarily mean that the long-term attitude of the apex court towards Article 184(3) will also change only because we have a new chief justice who has a different understanding of the superior judiciary’s role from the one held by his predecessor. Justice Khosa’s tenure may well turn out to be just a transitory phase, as has been the case with Justice Jillani’s.

What strengthens this probability are the views many apex court judges have already expressed. In a rather telling example, eight out of the 17 judges who heard a challenge to the 21st Constitutional Amendment (for the setting up of military courts) ruled that the Supreme Court, indeed, has the power to review constitutional amendments on the basis of what they called a basic structure or basic features of the Constitution. They also stated that it was the apex court’s jurisdiction to decide what was included in that basic structure and what was not. This meant that the Supreme Court could review, and annul, any future constitutional amendment that it deemed contrary to the putative basic structure. This was perhaps the most vigorous argument in the favour of a judicial review of constitutional changes — one that gave the superior judiciary a power to veto the will of the Parliament.

The court’s view suggests that in future too, some Supreme Court judges would like to extend the purview of the apex court as much as they can — and Article 184(3) could prove to be a handy tool if and when one or many of them decide to do so.

Before we move to discuss the limits and boundaries that Article 184(3) must have, it may help to reiterate the biggest reason for which Justice Nisar’s manner of exercising his constitutional powers is being questioned. It goes something like this: when courts frame policies, they weaken democratic process and perpetuate structural weaknesses in the government — that is, the executive branch of the state.

People elect a government to steer the state according to the promise and commitments made by politicians. It is also both the constitutional right and the responsibility of elected representatives to run the government. Judicial overreach in the form of activism or judicial populism diminishes the constitutional and legal space of the executive to function smoothly and effectively. It robs the executive of the opportunity, and thus the mandate, to implement its agenda. Not allowing the government to do so ensures that the political system and the administrative structure of the country remain immature and underdeveloped — or at least have a slow progress.

Seen in Pakistan’s context, judicial overreach weakens civilian governments vis-à-vis the military. An in-depth analysis of the Supreme Court’s working under both Justice Chaudhry and Justice Nisar will reveal that they never really challenged the military’s dominance in the polity. The latter, indeed, endorsed the idea of a civilian’s trial by a military court because of the “existential threat” faced by the country.

There, however, is another equally important but much less talked about dimension of judicial overreach that, in fact, impinges upon the judiciary’s own independence. In its latest manifestation, this was duly recorded in a note of dissent recently authored by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah. Somehow, it has not received the attention it deserves even when it includes a well-reasoned disagreement with a colleague, the Chief Justice of Pakistan in this particular case, on the exercise of judicial powers as provided by Article 184(3) and regulated by the Supreme Court’s rules framed under Article 191 of the Constitution.

The note is a continuation of a similar, earlier expression of disagreement by Justice Qazi Faez Isa — and also in the same case. Justice Isa penned the note in May 2018, when the three judges were hearing human rights complaints/cases referred to them by the Supreme Court’s Human Rights Cell (that was originally set up by Justice Chaudhry and that works directly under the supervision of the chief justice).

Justice Isa referred to the language of Article 184(3) and wondered whether the matters brought before the court by the cell fulfilled the criterion set by the article itself. He asked: did the matter put before the court have public importance and also require the enforcement of fundamental rights? Then he raised another question: who gets to decide whether the criterion has been fulfilled – the Supreme Court or the Chief Justice of Pakistan – given that the word used in the article is “court”?

Justice Isa was clearly adopting a textual approach to interpret and apply an important constitutional provision. Most jurists of yore would have instantly approved.

As soon as he expressed dissent, however, Justice Nisar dissolved the bench only to reconstitute it later. This, in the opinion of Justice Shah, could not have been done as the Supreme Court’s own rules do not give the chief justice the power to dissolve a bench after it has started hearing a case. This, as he pointed out, impinged on the “constitutional value of judicial independence” that, according to him, is fundamental to the rule of law. Here is how he explained it in a very straightforward way: “Any effort to muffle disagreement or to silence dissent or to dampen an alternative viewpoint of a member on the bench, would shake the foundations of a free and impartial justice system, thereby eroding the public confidence on which the entire edifice of judicature stands. Public confidence is the most precious asset that this branch of the State has. It is also one of the most precious assets of the nation.”

The two notes, as well as the civil-military equation in the country, necessitate – as does so much else that has transpired in the Supreme Court of Pakistan since 2006 – that an honest and detailed discussion is carried out on defining and setting the parametres for the exercise of judicial power under Article 184(3). The most important starting point for this discussion should be the contention that the apex court’s jurisdiction to enforce fundamental rights does not exist and operate in a vacuum. It carries certain preconditions within it.

The text of the article itself states that for any issue to attract the court’s jurisdiction, it must be of public importance and it must involve a violation of fundamental rights which are provided in the Constitution. The text makes absolutely no mention of the power of the Supreme Court, or that of the chief justice, to hear and decide cases on its own motion — a power often referred to as suo motu. Article 175 of the Constitution – which provides for the creation of the Supreme Court as well as the high courts – expressly states that no court shall have any jurisdiction except the one that is or could be conferred upon it by the Constitution or under any law. It may also be relevant to mention here that the Constitution confers suo motu power only on the Federal Shariat Court in Article 203D(1).

These textual preconditions become increasingly relevant when one explores the nature of the issues the Court, or rather the chief justices, has taken up suo motu in recent years. Leaving aside a handful of them, most are neither of public importance nor involve the infringement of fundamental rights. The markhor logo on PIA planes, for instance, could have been a bad corporate policy – perhaps even a wasteful one – but the matter certainly had little, if any, public importance and definitely did not violate anyone’s fundamental rights. It, therefore, did not deserve the court’s time and attention.

Yet, the Supreme Court under Justice Nisar was convinced that the Constitution allowed it to see the logo as a gross violation of fundamental rights of the people of Pakistan. It, thus, found it okay to spend scarce court resources on the case and also public money on the erasure of the logo.

The judges must keep in mind that even the apparent – though decidedly uneven and also transient – public support for judicial interventions in parliamentary and government domains does not make the doctrine of judicial activism constitutionally sustainable and acceptable. They should also realise that there is an inherent and intricate connection between the judiciary’s independence and how it interprets the Constitution and exercises its power to review government actions.

A judicial review may be legitimate only if it is guided by the constitutional scheme of separation of powers which regulates the relationship between different pillars of the state. If exercised injudiciously, a judicial review will only become the wielding of self-assumed powers by a hyperactive chief justice and/or some of his fellow judges. It will then be exercised sometimes at the expense of the views of other judges, often in violation of the Supreme Court’s internal rules and almost always in contravention of the Constitution itself. A judicial review lacking legitimacy, thus, ultimately impinges upon judicial independence as is illustrated by the opinions expressed by Justice Isa and Justice Shah.

Justice Nisar has certainly left the Supreme Court in a quandary which the incumbent chief justice and other judges will not find easy to deal with. The kind of unstructured, arbitrary and difficult to understand overreach of judicial power that he resorted to is probably the biggest threat that a civilian institution can pose to constitutional democracy in Pakistan.

In a paper written about a decade ago, Justice Khosa stated that the “jurisdiction conferred by law can in no circumstances be exceeded by a judge in the name of justice because such an approach completely negates the concept of rule of law”. He also stated that the judiciary will be completely independent only when it becomes free from internal threats. Such freedom will be the final frontier of judicial independence in Pakistan, he declared. 

“Apart from that concentration of powers in the hands of the head of a judicial institution regarding constitution of benches, allocation and distribution of cases amongst benches, attaching of priority to different kinds of cases and geographic transfer of judges is an issue which has raised eyebrows in the past and can also resurface in the future. A possible misuse of such powers by the head of a judicial institution can effectively render the independence of an individual judge to be of no practical utility or benefit to the citizens at large,” he wrote.

How Justice Khosa ensures that the judiciary’s independence is protected from the excesses he has mentioned in his essay will be the biggest test of the effectiveness of his term as the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The writer is a lawyer at the Lahore High Court and a human rights activist with a special interest in criminal and constitutional law and religious freedoms.

This article was originally published in the Herald's February 2019 issue under the headline 'Breach of justice'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

This winter has been marked by not only the regulars – fog and Kashmiri chai – but also by a worsening smog and gas shortage. In fact, energy shortfall and disputes over its allocation have become regulars as well. From frequent electricity breakdowns to acute gas load-shedding, these crises have only worsened in one way or another. A couple of weeks ago, the gas shortage reached such a high level in Sindh that industrialists in Karachi threatened to shut down factories in protest if the government did not address the problem.

Is there a common thread among these crises that leads all the way to policy, planning and operational levels? Are we keeping track of the basic indicators that are both predictive and prescriptive of these crises? Or are these indicators getting camouflaged in lobbying by industries as well as by political point-scoring?

A look at the indicators shows that almost 40 per cent of Pakistan’s energy needs are being met by natural gas. Power sector consumes 43 per cent of the total natural gas available in the country, followed by the residential sector and fertiliser production, each consuming 21 per cent of it.

In terms of the provincial share of the demand for natural gas, Punjab and Sindh lead, with 47 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Sindh is also the major supplier of natural gas – followed by Balochistan – which makes it strange that the province is also suffering an acute shortage this winter. According to a report prepared by Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) in 2016-17, the gap between supply and demand is expected to increase to 3,999 Million Cubic Feet per Day (MMcfd) in FY 2019-20 and 6,611 MMcfd by FY 2029-30 without imported gas.

These statistics leave very little room for adjustment if and when demand increases or supply decreases. Already when there is a 40 per cent increase in the demand during winter season, it always leads to cuts in supply but those cuts are never applied to the two industries — power and fertilisers. They are, instead, shifted to domestic consumers and other smaller industries that run on natural gas.

The growing demand for gas, however, has a history. It has been driven by not only an annual increase in its consumer base but also due to a switch by industries and automobiles from using oil to running on gas over the past decade and a half. When the switch started taking place, the policymakers failed to gauge its impact on the long-term balance between supply and demand. Additionally, the opacity of the way the change was allowed to take place hindered holistic and long-term planning.

In an ideal policy world, the switch should have been preceded and accompanied by a data-driven forecast of the shortfall in supply. This, in turn, would have helped policymakers formulate a timely and long-term action plan to address the shortage before it happened.

So, while we celebrated the cheaper fuel option that natural gas provided, we did not prepare ourselves for its shortfall and did not consider the fact that its production as well as import take both money and time. Now, part of the shortfall is being met by expansive imports in the short term. The continuity of even this short-term approach has been rocked by political and bureaucratic changes. What we need is continuity and change going hand in hand, especially of measures that impact critical sectors of the economy. While the larger policy framework should remain stable, it should be flexible enough to accommodate changes that occur due to factors that cannot be controlled such as weather.

The import of natural gas is impacted by not only national and regional politics but also by industrial groups that have become dependent upon it. In order to ensure transparency and to counter industrial lobbying, the public needs to demand data-driven accountability that not only clarifies the extent of the shortfall and its impact but also enables a clear, candid and honest debate so that all stakeholders can chart an effective policy for the future.

To create a sense of urgency to tackle the natural gas crisis, we must begin by quantifying the indirect impact of the shortfall along with its direct impact on various sectors of the economy so that the shortage of not only natural gas but also the overall energy mix is met by an effective, timely and long-term action plan.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The cost of a decent education in Pakistan was long overdue as a topic of national importance. It finally landed on the front pages of newspapers and as a top of the hour topic on our television talk shows only in the summer of 2015. Since then, a series of feuds between parents, school owners, regulators and the courts have dotted the national discourse intermittently. The Supreme Court’s instruction last month to 22 private school chains to reduce fees by at least 20 per cent is the latest in this continuum of debates that challenge elite private schools.

Pakistani parents have been running from pillar to post for their children’s education for over three decades now. Until the 1970s, a decent education was not necessarily expensive — mostly because all education was the domain of government schools. But as petrodollar-fuelled urban consumption began to soar and the effects of denationalisation emerged, private school chains began to dot the landscape of the three main cities of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad-Rawalpindi.

By the turn of the century, private schools came to be the assumed destination of young children belonging to parents with any kind of ambition at all, especially if they had the means to pursue it. If you ask private schools, they will tell you that their growth was the natural consequence of their superior services. Ask someone that believes in functioning states, and a level playing field for all children, and they will tell you elite private schools have grown because the state has abandoned the children of the poor and vulnerable in this country — parents do not really have a choice in the matter.

Plenty of evidence exists to validate both viewpoints. Elite private schools now manufacture the entirety of Pakistan’s upper end of human capital. But in the same country that manufactures some of the finest Wall Street bean counters and Silicon Valley coders, there are, by official Government of Pakistan estimates, at least 22.6 million children between the ages of five and 16 that do not attend any kind of school at all. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Albert O Hirschman, a German economist, published a book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, in 1970. In it, he describes what happens when the quality of a product or service deteriorates. The quality of government school education in Pakistan took a nosedive as the effects of nationalisation and the en masse recruitment of teachers as an act of political patronage began to destroy the Pakistani classroom. In keeping with Hirschman’s framework, those who could afford to, left the ‘peela schools’ (yellow-coloured government schools) in droves. As the economy grew throughout the decades, more and more Pakistani parents voted with their feet. They felt no loyalty towards low-quality government schools, they knew that no amount of raising their voice would work and they simply exited the system. Private schools – initially just the really good elite ones but eventually even low-quality ones with low fees – stepped in to fill the vacuum.

Today, government estimates suggest that the nationwide distribution of government to private schools is roughly 70:30. For every 3.5 children in a government school, a corresponding 1.5 attend a private school. The vast majority of these children attend what donors refer to (and love) as ‘low-cost private schools’. But approximately half a million children, among a total population of nearly sixty million kids of schoolgoing age, attend what can accurately be described as high-quality, high-cost private schools — or elite private schools. The vast majority of the parents of these children are hard-working, upper middle-class folks who struggle to pay for a good life each month. The elite private school is the primary key that unlocks the door to a secure future for their children.

In the summer of 2015, many of these parents found the fee invoices from these elite private schools to be higher than usual. A perfect storm had come together. First, the security measures necessitated by a deadly terrorist attack inside a school in Peshawar had imposed a substantial cost on private schools around the country, and the summer fee revision in 2015 was the first time it was manifest on invoices. Second, an additional withholding tax was slapped on parents whose children were charged more than 10,000 rupees. Third, Imran Khan’s sit-in protest of 2014 had demonstrated to discontent, educated urbanites just how powerful the combination of social media, catchy slogans and a reasonably just cause could be. Parents in major cities began to mobilise through Facebook forums and WhatsApp groups, and within a few weeks of the first protest, both the executive and the judiciary had taken note of the ruckus.

Since then, newly empowered parents have taken on elite school owners with an unprecedented relentlessness. But neither the judicial interventions nor the executive actions that follow or complement them have solved the core problem. Pakistani parents are still not getting a decent education at the average Pakistani school. The few schools that do offer a marginally better quality of education have had their freedom to charge fees clipped by judicial and executive actions like the recent 20 per cent reduction ordered by the chief justice. Ultimately, the owners of these schools will do what any business does in response to regulation: they will adjust the product or service they provide to match the price they are allowed to charge.

Whilst lower fees at elite private schools will offer a temporary respite for parents who feel aggrieved by the constant escalation in the cost of raising capable, strong, confident children — it does not actually tackle the menace of a failed education system. Government schools are still largely black holes into which bright futures are sucked in, never to see daylight again. Private schools cannot, just by the metric of scale and scope, ever address the entirety of the country’s need for education. And the divide between the haves and the have-nots will continue to grow.

Like all complex problems that have taken decades to emerge, the challenge of providing a high-quality education to Pakistani children can only be solved through coherent, consistent and relentless attention from political decision makers such as the prime minister and chief ministers. Elite private schools should certainly not be able to gouge parents, but in the effort to restrain such negative instincts, Pakistan may risk destroying the one source of excellence – marginal as it may be – within the education sector.

One thing should be clear to all stakeholders: populist sloganeering does not solve complex public policy problems. And ultimately, though the parents of children at elite private schools may think they have exited the realm of public policy, they are still very much part of the wider ecosystem of failure. The only enduring solution lies in better learning outcomes for all Pakistani children, not just theirs.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

After 17 years of the war led by the United States in Afghanistan, there has never been more momentum to launch a formal peace process.

First came the Taliban’s brief truce back in June 2018. Then came the news that Kabul has given its grudging support to Washington to talk directly to the Taliban — one of the insurgents’ top preconditions for negotiations.

And over the last few months, a series of informal talks have taken place involving the Taliban and Washington. The most promising meeting took place some days back in Abu Dhabi. Very senior representatives from the Taliban’s political office in Qatar and their top leadership in Quetta sat down with officials from the United States, but also from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — perhaps the three countries with the most influence over the Taliban.

In effect, the stars seem to be increasingly aligned for prospective talks. The White House, impelled by a president itching to head for the exits – as evidenced by his recently revealed intention to remove nearly 7,000 troops within the next few months – is all-in on efforts to launch reconciliation. Kabul is fully committed to pursuing peace. Key regional players Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran are all onboard. And, most significantly, the Taliban have telegraphed their willingness to explore peace.

This isn’t to understate the obstacles.

First, at the end of the day, no matter how many interlocutors may be willing to engage with them, the Taliban have little incentive to stop fighting a war that they believe they are winning. Trump’s recent troop withdrawal decision will only further embolden the insurgents. And additionally, the Taliban have repeatedly rejected the Afghan political system — meaning that convincing the insurgents to lay down their arms and share power or contest elections will be quite hard to do.

But one of the most immediate obstacles is the Taliban’s refusal to talk to the Afghan government.

For years, they have spun the same propaganda line: it is the American occupiers we are fighting, and so we shall only talk to them. Indeed, the Taliban have held talks with stakeholders from many nations over the years but only rarely have they agreed to sit across the table from Afghan officials. Indeed, while top representatives from Kabul – including the Afghan national security adviser – travelled to Abu Dhabi, the Taliban refused to meet with them.

An Afghan peace process cannot proceed without the Afghan government itself. And there can be no peace deal or broader reconciliation without Kabul.

This is where Pakistan can be helpful.

For years, Washington has sent confusing messages to Pakistan. It has urged Islamabad both to crack down on Taliban leadership sanctuaries and to coax the insurgents to the peace table.

The situation has evolved, however. The Taliban no longer need coaxing to come to the table. But they need coaxing to talk to Afghan officials at that table.

For Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States envoy for Afghan reconciliation, convincing the insurgents to talk to their country’s government is the challenge of the hour. And to this point, he has not succeeded. Islamabad may claim that its leverage over the Taliban has declined. In reality, so long as Taliban leaders continue to be based in Pakistan – and they are – Pakistan will retain leverage. And it now has a great opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the peace process.

If Pakistan can succeed in convincing the Taliban to sit down with Kabul, as difficult as that will be, the benefits would be great. Islamabad’s sputtering relations with Kabul and Washington would get a shot in the arm and Pakistan’s regional reputation would improve.

And most importantly, a long-elusive peace process would be poised to begin.

The writer is the deputy director of Asia Program and a senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.

This was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

There is virtue in stating the obvious sometimes, so let us begin there. The Supreme Court of Pakistan’s ruling in the Aasia Bibi case was an act of significant courage. The composition of the bench also sent out a message that the court fully grasped the sensitivity of the issue and its leadership stood as one; the incumbent as well as the next-in-line chief justice of Pakistan sat together and signed off on the verdict. Both of them authored rulings — Chief Justice Saqib Nisar wrote for the court while Justice Asif Saeed Khosa penned his widely celebrated additional note.

Now, we all know that one courageous decision does not make a system just or cure its entrenched flaws. You can be critical of the judicial branch (including for the delay in this case) while still appreciating, and acknowledging, acts of courage in individual cases. Nuance, and reasoned discourse, demand that.

Apart from the larger message(s) sent out, the reasoning in the ruling is solid and firmly rooted in the law. Both opinions – the court’s as well as Justice Khosa’s – lay bare fundamental flaws in the prosecution’s narrative. These included, but were not limited to, the highly suspect delay in filing of the First Information Report (FIR), prosecution witnesses contradicting each other – as well as their earlier statements to police – about when and before whom Aasia Bibi made her alleged confession, the date and details of a ‘public meeting’ where this supposed confession was made as well as the suppression of material evidence about the facts and circumstances leading up to the alleged blasphemous utterances. The chief justice noted, in no uncertain terms, the “material contradiction[s]” in the case of the prosecution. Justice Khosa called these contradictions “glaring” and lamented the “feast of falsehood” concocted to convict an innocent woman.

The gossamer veil of stability that our state habitually wears came apart in the aftermath of the ruling. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of what happened. Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) leaders made speeches that directly threatened the security of the Supreme Court judges. There were frightening calls for their security detail and staff to emulate Mumtaz Qadri who killed Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer while serving as his bodyguard in 2011. Chief of the army staff was vilified and soldiers were exhorted to carry out a coup against the military leadership.

This happened in relation to a case that has already seen the assassinations of Taseer as well as a former federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti. This happened in a country where lawyers (the late Rashid Rehman) and high court judges (the late Justice Arif Iqbal Bhatti of Lahore High Court) have been killed for representing, or acquitting, the accused in cases involving allegations of blasphemy.

The TLP leadership’s incendiary speeches were not the incoherent ramblings of those leading an angry mob. Their words were graphic and grounded in history.

In some ways, the scenes of lawlessness after the verdict represented part of the ultimate nightmare about Pakistan: mobs taking over our streets and highways while the state is paralysed. We may be confident that Pakistan’s civil and military forces are much stronger than the threat of raging mobs but the message we sent out to the world did not inspire faith.

I am not saying we should sing a dirge for the state but the state did not do itself any favours by legitimising the tactics, ideology and people involved as worthy of deference from the state. There is a serious symbolic value, and a strategic concession, in the act of putting ink to paper with those who rip apart public order. This also undermines our apex court. It sends the message that the executive can buckle, despite an authoritative pronouncement by the highest court in the land.

The fact that our ministers expressed frustration at Twitter for not blocking TLP chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi’s account was rather shocking. The most incendiary material was clearly not in TLP’s tweets. And the dangers inherent in civil society activists urging the blocking of Twitter accounts deserve a separate piece.

To understand that, we do not look far away from the apex court.

Another bench of the Supreme Court, comprising of Justice Mushir Alam and Justice Qazi Faez Isa, has been looking into the Faizabad sit-in organised by the TLP late last year. During the hearings, the apex court has shown annoyance as well as dissatisfaction over the lack of information, and answers, being made available about how the TLP came to be registered and financed as a political party. Newspaper reports about the hearing also reveal that the apex court is irked at how no state institution is willing to accept the responsibility for allowing a mob to hold life hostage in the federal capital for days.

In recent days, the senior leadership and many foot soldiers of the TLP have been detained. This has, reportedly, been done under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance 1960 (MPO). Make no mistake; this is not a punishment in any way for acts already committed. The MPO is used to prevent future action. Individuals are detained under this law when their planned or anticipated actions threaten to prejudice public safety or maintenance of public order. This is not a prosecution under the Pakistan Penal Code yet many others who never went as far as the TLP did are being prosecuted.

Latest reports suggest that Rizvi may now be tried under treason and terrorism charges. This may give his supporters another cause to mobilise for: that he is being excessively persecuted for raising a sensitive issue. A clear cut case of vandalism, unlawful assembly and disturbing public order, made strongly, could have worked better.

In America’s Federalist Paper No. 78, Alexander Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch of the government. He reasoned that the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse … [i]t may truly be said to have … merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

In the American context, this became painfully clear in the aftermath of Brown vs Board of Education cases, the famous Supreme Court ruling that declared race-based segregation in public schools as unconstitutional. There was significant pushback, including violence, especially in the Southern states. Many states and districts tried to block de-segregation orders. After a crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower in 1957 nationalised the state militia and went so far as to send in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure that the might of the executive supported the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling.

The “least dangerous branch”, especially when it acts with courage, needs the state to stand with it. Hamilton’s colleague, Madison, expected courts to enforce rights to protect ordinary citizens against the “tyranny of the majority”. Can we promise our vulnerable citizens such protection if courts feel the state will buckle?

For the public, or different sections of it, such cases are about confirming pre-conceived conclusions and biases; not what application of the law should lead to. People bracket themselves (and others) as progressive or extremists, corrupt or clean, supporters of innocence or guilt by deciding in advance the outcomes they want. There are lessons here for the legal profession. We must explore ways in which we can ensure that the processes, rulings and promises of our Constitution are accessible and emotionally felt. And just so we are clear, this is not to suggest that judges should abandon fidelity to due process.

One can only hope that the present times do not make actors in Pakistan’s legal system increasingly reluctant to take a stand for our religious minorities or other unpopular causes. But do not hold your breath.

The writer is a practising lawyer. He is a graduate of the University of London and Harvard Law School.

This article was published in the Herald's December 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Dear readers,

The Herald has decided to take down its Person of the Year survey from the Internet. We have been using a three-way system – a survey on the ground, an online opinion poll and a panel of 10 experts – since 2013 to choose our Person of the Year. This year the online poll has led to an unprecedented hate directed towards the magazine, deeply dividing public opinion and making the entire process controversial.

It is never the Herald’s intention to sensationalise, incite hate or promote bigotry. And it is for this reason that we have decided to not conduct the online opinion poll this year. We apologise to our readers for the inconvenience.

Is terrorism back to haunt us? This is the question many are contemplating in the wake of the recent terror attacks in Orakzai tribal region and at the Chinese Consulate in Karachi.

The sanguine answer to the question is to see these attacks as aberrations made possible by one-off intelligence failures. This is the view most states, including ours, would like to take after such incidents. You can bet that the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus is in overdrive right now, tracing the origins of the attacks, going after those responsible and plugging the gaps to avoid repeat attacks in the future.

For those of us in the peace-building profession, however, ‘absence of violence’ is a wholly unsatisfactory concept. Peace-builders like to talk of ‘negative’ versus ‘positive’ peace. The former denotes a mere absence of violence, implying that countries in conflict have managed to subdue active and frequent acts of violence. Most countries that claim to have ended terrorism achieve this state. But data shows that this is not enough. In many cases, negative peace reverts to violence.

Positive peace is a far more ambitious benchmark to achieve. It implies that the deeper causes that make populations vulnerable to terrorism have to be tackled by addressing virtually everything encompassing ‘good governance’, that is improving service delivery; ending political alienation among segments of the population; reversing extreme ideologies; and strengthening rule of law. It also implies an effort to reduce the incentives for domestic terrorists or external actors looking to destabilise a country, or even better, incentivise them to support stability instead.

Most states that have reached negative peace in the modern era do so by overpowering the insurgent/terrorist opposition through a combination of kinetic force and economic buyouts. The deeper, more difficult, aspects of positive peace are almost always pursued in a piecemeal fashion after negative peace is achieved.

Pakistan fits the model perfectly.

We followed a force-heavy model to tame Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its affiliates. We made the right noise by talking about and ultimately conceiving the National Internal Security Policy and National Action Plan (NAP) — both documents that recognise the need to do things beyond just fighting terrorists.

Unfortunately, it has been more talk than action. Ideas for ideological reform have remained just that — ideas. Despite significant resource allocation and the state’s efforts, the disenfranchisement of many, especially youth, in the conflict-hit northwest of Pakistan remains a serious issue. Of course, the state did itself no favours by delaying the integration of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) into the political, judicial and administrative mainstream. Further, critical factors that facilitate terrorists, such as their ability to raise money locally or internationally, are still intact.

Add to these internal dynamics the fact that Pakistan is now decidedly caught up in a geostrategic milieu where the intersection of great power competition and Pakistan’s tensions with three of its four neighbours leave it vulnerable to the proxy battles that are sure to ramp up in the times ahead.

What should we do?

Domestically, the state already has the right initiatives and plans in place. It simply needs to implement what it has promised. The NAP and the completion of Fata’s integration process ought to be top priorities to address counterterrorism and political alienation of the population most affected by conflict.

Domestic efforts must combine with a concerted effort to alter the regional dynamics affecting Pakistan by creating positive incentives for the states sceptical of or threatened by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to support it. International private businesses should be encouraged to invest to create global stakes in the initiative. More broadly, a vision that seeks to tie the CPEC’s north-south route with east-west connectivity in South Asia – thereby forcing China, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in a positive economic relationship – is the most obvious way to transform scepticism into opportunity.

This takes us back to where we started from: is terrorism back to haunt us?

In as much as the state has honed its kinetic and intelligence capacities needed for negative peace, we are not about to return to the mayhem of the past. And yet, the threat of terrorism is not over – it never was – and may, in fact, increase modestly over time if Pakistan fails to implement holistic domestic measures aimed at attaining positive peace and its external relations remain as fraught as they are today.

Moeed Yusuf is the associate vice president of Asia Programs at the United States Institute of Peace. He is also the author of 'Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia' (Stanford University Press, 2018).

This article was published in the Herald's December 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The October 5 arrest of Shehbaz Sharif, leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, under corruption charges plunged his already beleaguered Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) into another crisis. This now appears to be a familiar territory for the party, given the numerous run-ins of its leaders with the law in general and the accountability law in particular over the last two years.

The ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), on the other hand, remains largely unencumbered by any such concerns. With opposition parties struggling to come up with any semblance of unity so far, his arrest is expected to tilt the government-opposition balance of power further in the favour of the former. It would not be amiss to suggest that the PMLN appears rudderless and leaderless, reduced to creating fuss, sometimes an excessively charged one, in the Punjab Assembly – as has been witnessed during the presentation of the provincial budget recently – as well as in the National Assembly.

Yet the powers that be remain keen on forcing the PMLN further into a corner. In their calculus, the party continues to be electorally relevant and popular in central Punjab despite its losses in the general elections on July 25, 2018. It still has the potential to claw its way back into power. This explains why the process of accountability is so heavily tilted against it.

Seen within this context, Shehbaz Sharif’s arrest raises serious questions regarding the fairness, neutrality and motives of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). As do the frequent summoning of other PMLN leaders for investigation and the conviction of former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, also for corruption.

Most legal experts agree that the NAB law is a discriminatory piece of legislation. It places the burden of proof on the accused, with superior courts having placed only ephemeral restrictions against this provision. More pertinently, the NAB law was designed to suit the political objectives of Pervez Musharraf’s military-led regime that, initially, sought legitimacy through an anti-corruption crusade. The law’s application, however, became highly selective once a section of the political elite had been co-opted by him.

Ultimately, it gave way to even more political expediency manifested in the National Reconciliation Ordinance that withdrew many corruption cases against senior opposition politicians. The selective application of the NAB law has continued since then in some form or the other. Shehbaz Sharif, for example, has been arrested in a manner usually reserved for uncooperative individuals and those suspected of flying abroad. He was regularly appearing before NAB so there was little chance that he would flee the country. Meanwhile, a number of inquiries against other politicians, most notably, PTI’s power broker in Punjab, Aleem Khan, have meandered along for months.

The timing and the nature of NAB’s latest actions lend themselves to several theories. The first is that NAB’s high command works in tandem with the political interests of those who want to further weaken the PMLN.

The other theory is that NAB’s flexing of its muscles is an effort to attain public acclaim and importance – as is the case with some other state institutions – as an effective bulwark against ‘corrupt politicians’. Even though looking at the larger events through individual motives is often problematic, it still helps explain to some extent why of late there has been a flurry of news headlines around the NAB chief’s statements.

The messianic self-image of Pakistan’s unelected state officials is known to all. They all have a desire to ‘fix’ the system by wielding the largest possible stick against politicians. One such stick is offered by NAB. Since 1999, the bureau has recovered 296 billion rupees, most of it having been recovered from business owners and government officials.

This is contrary to its self-image of a watchdog against political corruption and its current posturing against politicians from a particular party.

This article was published in the Herald's November 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

In strictly legal terms, there is no ban on the operations of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Pakistan. Yet, in the span of a few years, this once thriving sector has reached the brink of extinction. This is well in line with the current version of statecraft in which an overzealous state apparatus is stifling all voices and avenues that offer a national narrative different from the one espoused by this apparatus — all of this being done without breaking any law.

International NGOs have been the first to face this strategy. Being foreign entities, they have to sign agreements with the federal government each time they intend to fund any projects in Pakistan. For decades, they have got approval for such agreements without any major problems. Over the last few years, however, the approval processes have been getting slower. In some cases, the delayed processes have ended in no agreements. In others, signing of agreements was delayed so much that the funds available for the concerned projects lapsed (because most foreign NGOs are required to consume their funds within specific time frames).

The government provides no reasons for delaying or refusing the agreements. The applicants, instead, are intimated that working in Pakistan is not their right but a privilege granted by the government at its own pleasure so the government is not bound to follow any rules and principles vis-à-vis the agreements.

Even if the funding agreements go through, local administrations, especially intelligence operatives, create many hurdles in the implementation of projects. They enter NGO offices at any time, sometimes seeking project-related documents and at other times asking hostile questions and issuing aggressive instructions. The default perception among government functionaries at the local level is that NGOs are some ‘non-combatant foreign enemies’ that need to remain under a permanent watch. Having a foreign staff member serves as ‘the final proof’ that an NGO has ‘ulterior’ motives.

Local NGOs are facing even bigger obstacles. They have to seek project-to-project based permissions from the federal government even if their donor has already signed an agreement with the relevant authorities for the same project. It is, of course, extremely difficult for organisations working at the district level to navigate the corridors of power at the federal level.

In yet another administrative measure to choke the workings of the NGO sector, many national-level non-government entities have been told by their respective registration authorities to submit an affidavit to declare that they are neither receiving any foreign donations nor will they accept any in the future. These, effectively, are orders to shut shop.

Ostensibly, the clamp down is being enforced in the name of compliance with the latest conditions imposed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global forum, which has put Pakistan on its grey list for not doing enough against money laundering and terror financing. The task force wants the country to improve its regulation of the not-for-profit sector which in many cases has worked as an important link in terror financing.

Many religious organisations and charities, including some that have been banned by the government, are registered under the same law that governs NGOs working in the development sector or for human rights causes. Technically, the latter are becoming collateral damage in the war against terror financing.

The damage, however, is not unintentional. Instead of making any attempt to separate NGOs from entities involved in terror financing, the government is trying to settle some imagined score with the NGO sector as a whole. This is not something new though its intensity is unprecedented. Successive governments have sought to delegitimise NGOs by promoting the same rhetoric that conservative religious groups espouse. The organisations working for regional peace are dubbed anti-state and unpatriotic. Those active against child labour are accused of undermining Pakistan’s economy. And the ones championing equal rights for women are alleged to be working on a western agenda that runs ‘contrary’ to our religious and cultural traditions.

There is nothing wrong in a government, or anyone else for that matter, critiquing the efficiency and effectiveness of NGOs as agents of change and development. Asphyxiating them, however, will certainly not make us a better country or a better society.

The writer works with Punjab Lok Sujag, a research and advocacy group focused on understanding governance and democracy.

This article was published in the Herald's November 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Imran Khan: “Heads.”

Shaikh Rasheed, Asad Umer, Pervez Khattak, Aamir Liaquat, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Zulfi Bukhari, Murad Saeed and Hamza Ali Abbasi all silently stare at each other.

Imran Khan: “We’ll bat. It is the final of the 1992 World Cup, we will play like cornered tigers.”

Shah Mehmood Qureshi whispers to Asad Umer: “You tell him. I told him last time and lost my chief ministership.”

Asad Umer whispers back: “Fine, but you wake up Pervez Khattak.”

Imran Khan: “Where is Javed Miandad? I can hear him shouting ‘take a run, take it, take it quickly!’”

Asad Umer, clearing his throat, responds: “Khan sahab, it is 2018 and we are in our cabinet meeting or as you make us call it, a cap-inet meeting.”

Imran Khan: “Why are we having these still? We won, Nawaz Sharif is in jail, Pakistan is saved.”

Asad Umer whispers to Shah Mehmood Qureshi who is throwing water on Pervez Khattak’s face to wake him up: “Should we tell him Nawaz is out?”

Imran Khan: “Have we sold Nawaz’s buffaloes yet?”

Hamza Ali Abbasi: “You must mean his family. I am so funny, and good looking. They say if I shave I look like Imran Khan. Girls be going crazy. Parwaaz hai junoon bro. We bros because we are all one Muslim Ummah.”

Murad Saeed: “I have shaved all over just to look like you, my Lord Khan sahab.”

Imran Khan: “I asked about the buffaloes, not the buffoons!”

Shaikh Rasheed, “When the milk is coming, why you need buffalo?”

Asad Umer: “Imran, I just looked at the numbers; we are not going to save the economy just by selling buffaloes.”

Imran Khan: “Sell the goats too then. Next Eidul Azha, we will be rich.”

Asad Umer: “No, we need a budget and we need to increase taxation.”

Imran Khan: “Increased taxation? We need to call for civil disobedience, burn those bijli kay bill. Bill bill Pakistan.”

Hamza Ali Abbasi: “Yes. More dharna, I will record it and go viral. I will sleep in the container.”

Shah Mehmood Qureshi: “Sir, I actually wanted to discuss our foreign policy.”

Imran Khan: “Why?”

Shah Mehmood Qureshi: “I am the foreign minister.”

Everyone laughs.

Shaikh Rasheed: “No tension, smoke Benson Shah sahab. I know all the streets of Pindi, it’ll take me two minutes on my CD 125 to grab the foreign policy for you on the way next time. Will bring you some pulao too!”

Aamir Liaquat: “Why are we not discussing the most important thing? Me!”

Imran Khan: ”Who is this small man?”

Aamir Liaquat: “Pakistan, Britain, Europe, especially Altaf bhai in London, France, Spain, UAE, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and even beyond, greetings from Aamir Liaquat.”

Zulfi Bukhari: “Thanks for including overseas Pakistanis. I will sponsor your Ramzan transmission this year. I can get Rihanna and Drake to sing your Ramzan song.”

Imran Khan: “Take Sheru instead.”

Asad Umer: “What about the budget?”

Imran Khan: “No need to budget when you got Tareen in the house!”

Shaikh Rasheed: “Think about the trains Khan sahab, we can all just stand behind each other and go chu chu chu chu chu chu chu.”

Murad Saeed: “If you talk about the budget, I will kill you. Khan sahab will bring back six million billion trillion from Mr Bajaj.”

Pervez Khattak (suddenly waking up): “What time is it?”

Imran Khan: “Show time. Meeting is over. We are going to march to Islamabad. Dharna tonight boys, somebody bring Dj Butt. Captain out.”

Asad Umer: “But what about the country?”

Imran Khan, while walking out: “I dedicate this world cup victory to myself. Modi is a small man with small ... ” his voice fading.

Everyone sits silently again and then leaves. Asad Umer leaves his laptop behind.

Five minutes later on Skype.

Atif Mian: “Sorry I was late, I just got out of class at Princeton. What did I miss? Hello? Can you hear me? Is there anyone there? Hello? Guys? Guys?”

This article is part of the Herald's satire series titled 'Newsbite', originally published in the October 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

India’s unprecedented reaction to the #MeToo movement has hit one industry after the other as more and more women are divulging stories of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and ingrained casual sexism on social media. The movement has also drawn a lot of criticism from several quarters with some slamming it as being a ‘naming and shaming’ movement which has no capability of actually changing the system. This school of thought has found agreement in former Supreme Court judge Sujata Manohar.

According to Justice Manohar, who was responsible for writing up the Vishakha guidelines to ensure no working woman is subjected to sexual harassment in August 1997, “No purpose will be served if women limit themselves only to social media”.

In an exclusive interview with the Free Press Journal, Justice Manohar said, “The guidelines which I had penned down dealt only with contemporary cases where a woman is being harassed at her work field. The guidelines were not at all meant to look into cases wherein women come out after decades.”

This, she says, leads to a lot of difficulty for the police in actually finding evidence to corroborate the accuser’s claims.

“The evidence of what took place some 20 to 25 years ago is obviously not going to remain as it is. There should be something reliable in place for the police to prosecute the named accused as there are always chances of some women merely naming others to settle personal scores,” Justice Manohar told Free Press Journal.

“This is not the scenario in current cases where women are being harassed, as the police can easily cross check the allegations,” Justice Manohar added.

The best course of action, Justice Manohar said, would be for women to directly go to the police to name their abusers and harassers instead of staking to social media to out their names.

“No purpose will be served if woman limit themselves only to social media. They have the option to approach the police, instead of the social media. Their failure to report the case also hints that the forum is being misused by many because of which genuine women might have to suffer,” Justice Manohar said.

Justice Manohar also stressed on how the government needs to formulate a new law to resolve complaints as the Vishakha guidelines was designed only for contemporary harassment.

“Unless there is a law to deal with cases as revealed through this movement, no one can do anything. The existing laws do not focus on such kind of complaints; thus, there is a need to formulate a law which can define the nature of offence, and then what kind of punishment must be imposed, and so on,” Justice Manohar said.

This article was originally published in The Wire.

What we often report is that it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who passed a constitutional amendment on September 7, 1974 to declare Ahmadis non-Muslims. What we frequently state is that it was his nemesis Ziaul Haq who promulgated Ordinance XX which prohibits those already declared as non-Muslims from practising Islam. We trot out these constitutional and legal provisions sometimes to explain and at other times to justify – even condone – the unending physical and psychological violence inflicted upon the Ahmadi community in Pakistan. Such as when a mob burned down Ahmadi houses and historical sites in Sialkot on May 23, 2018. Such as when Atif R Mian, an economist at the Princeton University, had to resign on September 7, 2018 from the newly elected government’s Economic Advisory Council.

Those who support the exclusion of Ahmadis from public life in Pakistan argue that this exclusion is well-deserved because the Ahmadi community violates the Constitution of the Islamic Republic by insisting on being Muslim. (They conveniently ignore the fact that all citizens do not have to agree with all the provisions of a constitution all the time. Otherwise, any demand for a constitutional amendment would be illegitimate.) Even those who support civic liberties for Ahmadis do so only after qualifying their statements with Ahmadi-specific legal and constitutional provisions.

That the problems we have with Ahmadis all stem from the law and the Constitution is a soft-bellied lie of our prejudiced present and fallacious history. The current status of Ahmadis does not have its origin in 1974.

We seldom pause to remember how anti-Ahmadi laws came about and how the movement against them originated. We assume that these things happened as a logical next step after the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state, making it an imperative to define and determine who was a Muslim – and, thus, a legitimate citizen of the new state – and who was not.

We need to remind ourselves that the discrimination that Muslims display towards Ahmadis did not suddenly develop after the creation of Pakistan. In fact, Majlis-e-Ahrarul Islam – one of the earliest instigators of an anti-Ahmadi movement – originated in British-ruled India. As early as 1935, it made a call for Ahmadis to be excommunicated from Islam and expelled from government offices. One key target of its ire was Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan, a leading Ahmadi jurist at the time.

We also need to remind ourselves that there have been many fierce champions of an anti-Ahmadi cause much before Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan’s chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi came to promote it last year. One of the most prominent among them was one Agha Shorish Kashmiri, a poet, reporter, author and publisher. He did much, perhaps the most, to turn Pakistan’s Urdu-reading middle class – mainly in Lahore and Karachi – against Ahmadis.

Born in Amritsar in 1917, Kashmiri joined the Majlis-e-Ahrarul Islam in the mid-1930s and spent more than five years in jail under the Defence of India Act in the late 1930s and the early 1940s for his anti-Ahmadi activities. In 1944, Kashmiri moved to Lahore and began his career as a journalist. On January 1, 1949, he launched a colour weekly from the same city. It was called Chatan (‘rock’ in English).

Kashmiri imagined the magazine as one dedicated to the cause of Islam. It deployed Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry and Islamic history as twin poles to emphasise the finality of the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him) as the last messenger of God. It had a couplet from a poem by Iqbal as its motto (which was printed on the cover of its every issue): Agarche buth hain jamaat ki aasteenon main/mujhe hai hukm-e-azaan la ilah-a-illallah (though idols are hidden in the sleeves of those standing for prayer/I am commanded to proclaim there is no God but Allah).

Inspired by Zamindar, a Lahore-based Urdu newspaper that had played a major role in mobilising Punjabi Muslims along religious lines before 1947, Chatan was priced low so as to maximise its outreach. For the first few years, an issue cost a couple of annas (12 paisas); by 1965, it cost 37 paisas; by 1980, its price rose to three rupees.

Chatan argued that, instead of being a religious group, Ahmadis were a political community that had conspired to create Pakistan out of India in order to have its own independent state which, it claimed, was going to be set up in Kashmir. This claim was the reason why Kashmiri raised his voice against Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan’s appointment as Pakistan’s foreign minister, arguing that, being an Ahmadi, he would misuse the post to help his own community achieve its political objectives.

Chatan also published reports that claimed Ahmadis were poisoning the Pakistani Army and the civil bureaucracy with their propaganda. Soon, the magazine started organising public meetings to demand Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan’s ouster from the government. These meetings featured speeches and writings from religious figures as Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Abu’l Hasan Nadwi, an eminent scholar.

Thus originated the earliest political movement in Pakistan — with the objective to demonise, expel and even discard the Ahmadi community. It is a movement that has been with us since 1947 – since the Kashmir issue began – and Jinnah appointed Zafarullah Khan as Pakistan’s foreign minister.

Maududi and Nadwi subsequently published two pamphlets, Qadiani Masla (The Qadiani Problem) and Qadianiat: Islam aur Nabuwwat-e-Muhammadi kay khilaf aik baghawat (Qadiani Movement: A rebellion against Islam and Prophet Muhammad), respectively. The pamphlets were published in March 1953.

Chatan, in the meanwhile, was aggressively mobilising public opinion against Ahmadis, labelling the agitation against them as Tehreek-e-Raast Iqdaam (Righteous Step Movement). Yet the agitation was seen by many in the country merely as an “Ahrar-Ahmadi Controversy”— at least this is how Justice Muhammad Munir framed it in his inquiry report on the anti-Ahmadi pogroms of 1953.

Kashmiri made a fresh bid at fanning anti-Ahmadi hatred in the mid-1960s. He began to argue that the Ahmadis were, in fact, Zionists. By using terms such as Mirza’il (an amalgamation of Israel and Mirza, the title of the Ahmadi community’s founding leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad) and Ajami Israel (Eastern Israel), Kashmiri relied heavily on anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish notions to associate Ahmadis with a Zionist conspiracy to dominate the whole world. Chatan’s earlier insistence on Ahmadis being a political community was now smeared with an anti-Semitic internationalism.

The stories published in Chatan included lists of Ahmadi civil servants, bureaucrats and businessmen — ‘secretive’, ‘conspiratorial’ Ahmadis who were planning to bring about the demise of Pakistan. Ayub Khan’s dictatorial regime, that was generally soft towards the magazine, started censoring its contents in 1967. Kashmiri published the censorship order on his magazine’s cover on August 1, 1967. He was also jailed during this period for inciting violence.

After 1971, Chatan blamed the creation of Bangladesh on Ahmadi ‘conspiracies’. It portrayed Mirza Muzaffar Ahmad, President Yahya Khan’s economic advisor, as the source of grievances that East Pakistanis had developed against West Pakistan. On October 18, 1972, the magazine published a cover story that ‘exposed’ India’s plans to divide Pakistan into many states. Along with Bangladesh, these included Sindhudesh, Khalistan and an Ahmadi state in Balochistan.

During these years, Chatan turned to lobbying Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who had taken over power from Yahya Khan and who had already received a glowing profile in the magazine’s December 4, 1967 issue for publicly declaring that Ahmadi were non-Muslims. Though the government briefly jailed Kashmiri in August 1972 for provoking anti-Ahmadi violence, his agenda was clearly ascendant. By then the title of Mujahid-e-Khatm-e Nabuwwat (the soldier of the finality of prophethood) was conferred upon him by his supporters.

Kashmiri died in 1975 but Chatan did not stop its anti-Ahmadi campaign. It published cover story after cover story ‘exposing’ the presence of Ahmadi spies in the government as well as an Ahmadi ‘conspiracy’ to control the whole world in collaboration with Jews. Its July 12, 1982 issue carried a cover photo of Zia along with a self-explanatory caption: “Qadiani Activities and the Role of the President”. Inside the magazine was the coverage of an International Khatm-e Nabuwwat Conference in London and an article ‘exposing’ an Ahmadi ‘conspiracy’ against Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. The article included a quote from Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is credited with being the founder of that programme, to substantiate its claims.

Chatan, however, is just one of the many streams that contribute to the river of hatred that separates Ahmadis from Muslims in today’s Pakistan. The magazine’s long run – that ended in 1989 when it ceased publication – helps us see the role of popular media in creating a public opinion in which Ahmadis have been reduced to nothing but conspirators, sub-citizens and even sub-humans.

These are the foundations of our hatred and communal discrimination that undergird our contemporary perceptions of the Ahmadi community — not any law or a constitutional amendment.

In an earlier version of this article, we wrote that Chatan held public meetings that featured religious figures such as Maulana Abul A'la Maududi and Maulana Abu'l Hasan Nadwi. We would like to specify that these meetings featured speeches and writings from the aforementioned religious figures. We also wrote that Maududi and Nadwi went on to publish two books in March 1953. They were actually pamphlets. We apologise for the errors.

The writer is a historian at Columbia University in New York.

This article was published in the Herald's October 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It is for the first time that a sitting high court judge is facing a public trial — one that he himself has asked for. But Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui is no ordinary judge — if judges in Pakistan can be ordinary anymore. On the eve of the 2018 general elections, he leveled serious allegations against the army’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of meddling in both the judicial and political systems. He thundered in front of a group of lawyers in Rawalpindi that the ISI was exerting pressure on the judiciary to keep Nawaz Sharif and his daughter behind bars. Agreeing with him, some lawyers can be heard shouting in a video of the event that soon went viral on social media: ‘Shame, Shame!’

But this is not why the honourable judge is facing an open trial. He is accused of refurbishing his official residence beyond entitlement. His response? Asking for a complete list of expenses incurred on the residences of all judges serving in the superior judiciary. Perhaps by showing that he is not the only one spending money on his house, he will be able to prove that he is being victimised because he has fired a salvo at the ISI, and not for the first time. In recent years, Justice Siddiqui has criticised the army several times, particularly with regards to its dealings with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) government. It does not help that he is a close relative of Irfan Siddiqui who served as Sharif’s advisor.

Justice Siddiqui also questioned the army’s role as the mediator between the government and protesters during last year’s religious protests at Faizabad over changes in election nomination forms and implied that the ISI was providing tacit support to the agitators. This brings us to the likely reason why Justice Siddiqui wanted an open trial. He did so because he wants to argue that he is being targeted because he has spoken against a powerful state institution. He knows the system and how to work it. And, for many in the country, it would have been a convincing argument — had it not been for Justice Siddiqui’s past.

He obtained his law degree from the University of Punjab and started practicing in district courts of Rawalpindi in 1988. He was later elevated as an advocate of the high court and eventually the Supreme Court. He was an activist of the Jamaat-e-Islami and unsuccessfully contested the 2002 general elections as a National Assembly candidate of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). It is towards the end of the previous decade that Justice Siddiqui gained more prominence as a lawyer and activist. In 2007, he represented the Lal Masjid cleric and helped him obtain bail in terrorism cases following the siege of the mosque in the same year. It was also around this time that he joined the Lawyers’ Movement against Pervez Musharraf for sacking then Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Recently, he was removed from a bench hearing a petition filed by Chaudhry, seeking Imran Khan’s disqualification from parliament.

Justice Siddiqui was rewarded for his loyalty to Chaudhry in 2011 – the year he was also elected president of the Rawalpindi Bar Association – when he was made a judge of the Islamabad High Court. Blasphemy and the finality of prophethood has also been a subject very close to Justice Siddiqui’s heart. Earlier last year, when five bloggers went missing and were later accused to be blasphemers, he proposed drastic censorship measures to weed out blasphemous content from the Internet and directed that cases be registered against them. This year, he passed an order saying it must be mandatory to declare one’s faith to be allowed to join the army, judiciary or civil services. It was directed at those who, he said, may use the name of Islam to hide their real identity — namely, Ahmadis.

Justice Siddiqui’s judgments are speaking louder than his allegations — and they seem to be telling tales of someone who has been publicly discriminatory towards certain individuals and communities. That alone should be reason enough that he does not judge anyone — the powerful and the marginalised alike.

This article was originally published in the Herald's August 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

If the water bureaucracy of Pakistan and Prime Minister Imran Khan are to be believed, the question of building dams has come to have the same import as its Shakespearean equivalent. To be or not to be was the question that Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, contemplated in the eponymous play as a choice between life and death. But is the choice really that stark as far as building dams is concerned? Can a piece of infrastructure, and that too as mundane as a wall in a river, be a matter of life and death for a country as large and diverse as Pakistan? My favourite analogy about the dam debate is the choice of transport between, say, Rawalpindi and Lahore. One could travel by airplane, train, car, bus, horse, foot and so on. In such a scenario, to declare that anyone thinking about traveling by any other mode but an airplane is an anti-development traitor and an Indian agent is simply madness. A madness that Pakistani society at this time is partaking in with a lot of gusto.

Every Pakistani should have adequate water to ensure their health and hygiene. The entire country should have enough water to support its food security and economic prosperity. But if the objective is to ensure water security, a dam is one instrument besides many others which can be applied to achieve this objective. Obsession with a single pathway to achieve water security, that is, dams, may not only be stupid but also downright expensive and counterproductive.

Many of the arguments supporting large dams are predicated upon a number of fallacies. Let us review the most salient of them. The first argument is that large dams are essential for water storage. It is not true. There are three types of water storage: glaciers, groundwater storage and surface water storage (through dams). From among these three types of storage, human beings cannot do anything about glaciers. Of the remaining two, surface storage is most expensive and wasteful because of evaporative and seepage losses as well as financial and environmental costs. Groundwater storage, on the other hand, is the most efficient and demand responsive. It is little wonder then that in the United States alone hundreds of dams are being decommissioned and water storage for the past 30 years has almost exclusively been undertaken in groundwater mode.

Pakistan is very fortunate to have vast aquifers underlying the Indus planes which provide up to 80 per cent of the crop water requirements in those areas where fresh groundwater is available. Wise management of those aquifers, and not mismanagement as is the case right now, could ensure up to 54 million acre feet (MAF) of stored water as compared to seven MAF that Kalabagh Dam could store in a year. So, the dam argument does not work as far as water storage is concerned because there are cheaper and more efficient ways of storing much more water.

The second argument in favour of dams is that we are running out of water and that we have to store water for when we have less of it. This also does not hold water. Firstly, we are not running out of water. There is no natural or physical process through which we can run out of water. The same amount of water we have had for thousands of years will be around for many more years. We just have to use that water wisely. Even after taking climate change into consideration, there is no scientifically legitimate scenario under which we run out of water. Also, dams do not create water; they store whatever water there is. If in another universe we were running out of water, dams would simply be empty in that case.

The third argument is that every year we waste 35 MAF of water that goes to the sea. For people in Karachi, it might be useful to visit Gharo and Keti Bandar to see what lack of water in the Indus delta does to land and lives. Water going to the sea is not wasted; it is essential for the ecology and livelihoods of people living in coastal areas. Also, a brief look at the amount of water flowing below Kotri Barrage tells a whole different story. For eight out of the past 10 years, the average annual flow of water below Kotri has been under 10 MAF; sometimes even less than five MAF. It is only in the flood years that enough water flows below Kotri Barrage to make up an average of 35 MAF over 10 years. Average flows are the most irrelevant number in the water sector, something that our engineers cannot seem to get their heads around. The upshot is that there is simply not enough water in the system for a large dam, the size of Kalabagh Dam or Diamer-Bhasha Dam, to become viable. If one cannot fill a dam for 75 per cent of the time over a decade, how does that make that dam financially or functionally viable?

The fourth argument is about energy: dams deliver cheap electricity. But given their capital cost, as researcher Hassan Abbas has calculated, a 100 watt bulb run on electricity produced from a dam will cost 100,000 rupees. We have abundant solar power potential using which means the cost of electricity can be 20 times cheaper than what we will pay for electricity from the Neelum-Jehlum project, for example.

Lastly, Diamer-Bhasha Dam is not so much a water storage dam as it is a hydroelectric dam with a projected cost of 14 billion US dollars which is likely to double over its construction period. All that one does with hydroelectric dams is to build an artificial waterfall. At the likely cost of 28 billion US dollars, Diamer-Bhasha Dam will probably be the most expensive artificial waterfall in the world. And that too on one of the most silt rich rivers and in the most seismically active zone in the world. The consequences of the dam’s failure in this case are too terrible to contemplate. It will mean the end of every infrastructure on the Indus and hundreds of thousands of lives. Do dams get built in seismically active zones? Of course, they do. But such dams, for example those built in California which are seismically active, tend to be of lower height, around 100 feet, to protect against their failure. We are instead proposing to build the highest dam in the world, at 933 feet, in a deep gorge. The foolhardiness of the proposal is simply stupefying.

The real cost of building Diamer-Bhasha Dam is likely to be 10 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Few countries in the world would spend 10 per cent of their GDP on a risky proposition.

Is there a water crisis in Pakistan? And what do we do about it, if not to build dams? There is certainly a water crisis in Pakistan and it is a lot worse than we think it is. And it has been around for decades. Children die of renal failure in Pakistan today due to lack of clean drinking water. In parts of Karachi, people have not received water in their taps for more than a decade. The crisis is urgent and it is here. The remedy suggests itself in the simple statistic from Pakistan’s water distribution policy — that 97 per cent of water in Pakistan is devoted to agriculture.

All human habitations combined in Pakistan, including large cities like Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, can only lay claim to about two per cent of the available water. Industry also uses one per cent of the total water. Meanwhile, Pakistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton and one of the major exporters of rice and sugarcane. All three crops are major consumers of water, and all three, generally, are produced by large farmers. Simply removing subsidies on agricultural electricity, I would argue, will solve the problem of water waste in the agriculture sector in one go. Sensible crop choices could, furthermore, quadruple the amount of water available for the all-important domestic water supply sector.

To be or not to be, is not the question. Neither should the question be to dam or not to dam. The question should be: how do we give every Pakistani equitably access to water? How do we use water efficiently enough to get maximum economic benefit from it? How do we meet multiple expectations from water for our ecology, culture, economy and society? The biggest water crisis in Pakistan is its unjust distribution. Golf courses and exotic plants never face scarcity of water in big cities; only the poor have no water. Large sugarcane farms have plenty of water; small farmers do not have enough to grow food. These are the features of the water crisis that deserve immediate attention. And along the way if one needs to build a small dam here and there, to address the water crisis, then so be it.

The writer works at the department of geography at Kings's College London.

This article was published in the Herald's October 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

A writer’s life is necessarily a solitary one however appealing one’s fantasy might be of composing a poem while sitting in a bistro in Paris or jotting down notes for a novel, while nursing a pint in a London pub. How wonderful then to receive an invitation to a literary festival where there will be dozens of writers to meet, publishers’ editors to discuss business with, and best of all, to have materialise before one’s eyes, in flesh and blood, that vast abstraction known as ‘readers’. For a writer, a literary festival is both a validation of his or her status with readers and also an inspirational occasion that induces the gratifying inner conviction that one is not alone; that there are other souls on the planet afflicted with the same lunacy to put words together and enjoy the illusion of having composed something that will receive the world’s standing ovation.

Although there were public readings, usually by poets, in the past, I don't remember there being literary festivals before, say, 1970. My own writing career began in the 1960s, when I had invitations to read my poems in many cities in England and acquired enough of a reputation to be invited across the Atlantic to read with other international poets at the Poetry Center at 92Y in New York (1968) and to the Library of Congress in Washington (1970). These two events, each taking place over several days and featuring some of the most celebrated poets of the era – from France, Japan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Ecuador and Chile, with whom I felt honoured to be representing Pakistan – were the closest to the idea of a modern literary festival.

The Poetry Center had been made famous by Dylan Thomas appearing there in the 1950s, shortly before alcoholism killed him in a hotel in New York. When I appeared there on the evening of my reading with two other poets,before we walked out to the stage, we found a full bottle of Johnny Walker at our disposal in the green room where we waited, and were marked that that must have been a practice established during Thomas’ visit. The event at the Poetry Center had been written about in the New York papers, and there were lavish parties, of which I'm proud to say the best was the cocktail party given by the Pakistan consulate on the day of my reading.

The event at the Library of Congress – again restricted to international poets – resembled a modern literary festival even more, though it remained a celebration exclusively of poetry, which was heard much more seriously than it is now. And the poets who had been invited, both at the New York Poetry Center and at the Library of Congress, were not there to fulfill some politically correct agenda but because the organisers had one principal aim — to bring to the American audience poets they considered eminent in their language. This idea of inviting writers of distinction was not taken up by literary festivals.

One began to hear of literary festivals in the 1970s, particularly the one in Toronto,which became famous among writers and remains a model for other festivals. The first time I was invited to Toronto,some 30 years ago, there were about 50 other writers; the second time, a dozen years later, there were twice the number, so popular was the Toronto festival with writers,their publishers and enthusiastic Canadian book lovers who came in droves, paid a not-so-insignificant entrance fee and bought several books to have them signed by their authors.

The Toronto festival was organised on a grand scale. Writers checked into the appointed luxury hotel where they could spend the entire week during the festival even though they were scheduled for only one 20-minute performance and a book-signing session. Before the readings in the evenings,all the writers were driven to dinner at first class restaurants – a different one each night – and after the evening's performance they could go to what was called the ‘hospitality suite’ at the hotel where an unlimited amount of whichever drink one desired was available for as long into the night as the visiting writers wished to spend their time talking to one another.

During the day, writers were free to explore Toronto or to join bus tours taking them to tourist attractions. And finally, everyone was invited to be driven to Niagara Falls, which – the month being October and Canada’s maple trees in gorgeous autumn display – was a beautiful drive followed by the magnificent sight of the Falls.

All this wonderful hospitality was not cheap. The Toronto Festival paid the writers’ airfares whether they came from Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro, and each writer was given enough dollars with which to explore Toronto during the day as well as to buy their lunch. Funding came from sponsors.

After the 1980s, more and more cities caught on to the notion that literary festivals were a fairly cheap investment that paid off handsomely: festivals brought them global attention, boosted their economy, entertained their population, made the cities feel an important part of the international scene and,best of all, enhanced the image of the nation by portraying it as culturally advanced. We were now in the middle of the digital revolution and though e-books were yet to begin supplanting the traditional book, publishers found literary festivals a significant component of their marketing strategy.

While virtual reality was about to overwhelm us, literary festivals maintained our sense of the old physical reality, for there we could pick up a real book, meet the real person who had written it and get the writer to sign the book, which would be a prized possession to pass on to our grandchildren who would gaze at it with wonder and pride.

But here’s the flip side. Before literary festivals became common, similar events were rare and usually involved only internationally acclaimed writers. In London in the 60s, there were many local poetry readings attended by 30 or 40 people who listened politely, applauded softly and quietly went away, there being no book signing. But only two major events remain in one’s memory from that decade: one that filled the Festival Hall on the South Bank and another that packed the Albert Hall, where it was thrilling to see and hear the likes of W H Auden and Pablo Neruda. Only writers of established international repute were invited to perform.

At present, with the proliferation of festivals, that thrill has been vastly diminished since festivals are overrun by hordes of writers whose only distinction is that they have recently published a book which they have come to promote; and among them the few familiar names are of writers who are currently popular or have acquired some notoriety unconnected with literature and this group appears almost everywhere,from Toronto to Sydney, Paraty to Jaipur, Edinburgh to this small provincial city where I live — Austin,Texas, which too has a literary festival that attracts scores of writers each November.

Where great writers like Neruda appeared to enrich our experience of their work when we heard them read, writers at literary festivals are primarily there to promote their work — and much of that work, I'm sorry to say, is destined for the trash heap. The popular obsession with wanting to possess a book with the autograph of the author on the flyleaf helps drive up sales, and therefore book signings at literary festivals are of important commercial significance to publishers.I am aware that my reference to ‘hordes of writers’must sound snootily elitist; I know, of course, that among them there could be the next Neruda and that democratically, it is appropriate and politically correct for every new writer to be given a chance in the spotlight.

But the model for such indiscriminate inclusiveness is the capitalist notion of letting the market decide what holds the most value; and the occasion –instead of being a festival that celebrates literature – becomes a promotional fair given the rather grand title of ‘Literary Festival’ that prompts in the mind of the public making its annual pilgrimage the charming illusion that it is privileged to be among the elect.

Publishers urge writers to goon a book tour, appear at as many literary festivals as possible and give interviews on local public radio stations.Festivals have become an important part of public relations, but not to promote good literature as much as to sell more books to a public attract-ed by the personality of a writer and no longer by a reasoned critical evaluation.

A former literary agent of mine once said that one small paragraph of gossip in People magazine sold more books than a favourable full-page review in the New York Times.Personality sells.

Literary festivals play to the cult of personality. The first time I appeared in Toronto, it was only to read and sign books. The second time, it was also to sit before an audience and be interviewed. I expected that no one would want to buy an entrance ticket in order to hear me answer questions put by an interviewer and was shocked, when I went on stage,to see that there was quite a full house with a television camera set up to record the event. I realised that we now lived in the age of television talk shows, that trivial gossipy chat now passed for intellectual relevance and that banality was confounded with seriousness.

Personality interviews are everywhere. A tennis player wins a match and is instantly interviewed; a soprano is about to go onstage for an opera that is being televised and is interviewed with such profound questions as how she has prepared for the role — wherever there is a personality, there is someone nearby, microphone in hand, with a question which is invariably inane and often downright stupid. During public performances, I have never been asked a question of any literary significance; what most people in any audience seem to want is trivial chit-chat as if that is some-how going to illuminate one’s literary work.

Another act that became common at literary festivals was the panel discussion. Some topic, which is inevitably a silly one from the point of view of serious literature, is adopted as a theme for the panel to discuss. A topic that frequently crops up is for a panel of novelists to discuss the future of the novel. The best answer declining an invitation to be on such a panel was given by Nabokov, when he wrote in The Times on May 30, 1962, “I am supremely indifferent to the ‘problems of a writer and the future of the novel’ that are to be discussed at the conference”. A writer by definition can have no interest in talking and readers who imagine their understanding is heightened by some gossipy detail a writer might let slip in an interview are not worth having.

These critical reservations apply more to cities in the Western hemisphere where, I do think, the beautiful idea of a literary festival has been appropriated by business and transformed into a selling opportunity, with only those writers being invited who have a new book to promote. I saw this in Brazil where a literary festival, inaugurated a few years ago, is held annually in the beautiful colonial city of Paraty (pronounced Para-chee), south of Rio, to which any writer would be thrilled to be invited.The media coverage in advance of and during the festival is impressive, with Rio newspapers printing literary essays of high intellectual content; the more distinguished of the visiting writers are treated as celebrities; the bookshops display heaps of books by participating writers. There is a feverish excitement among book lovers who throng to Paraty. It truly seems like a festival. But again, what is staged as a celebration of literature is essentially a homage to the god of commerce. In the end, it is all about selling books.

For the occasion to be a real festival, the invitees should include, first of all, two or three of the very best writers in the world. Secondly, a small group of writers native to the country where the festival is being held ought to be presented to showcase the nation's contribution to world literature And thirdly,the invitees should include two other groups: one drawn from those whose talent has been attracting increasing attention and from whom a major new work might emerge and the other drawn from the youngest generation whose early work shows a promising freshness.

I observed some of that freshness at the first two Karachi festivals that I was privileged to attend. For me personally, it was emotionally poignant and intellectually thrilling to meet Pakistani writers half my age whose work reverberated with the ring of distinction. I also thought the idea of running a creative writing workshop for students was an excel-lent event to add to a literary festival and I hope it will become a regular part of the programme in future festivals. It is excellent because it creates an opportunity for an older, established writer to pass on to the young the best of what he has learned over a lifetime of practising his art, and for the students, the vivid living experience of having their work critiqued by the author, even when the criticism seems cruelly severe, can be a source of lasting inspiration.

Surely, book selling and book signing should remain an essential part of a literary festival; but we should never forget that what drives us to come together in joyous celebration is the supreme pleasure the human mind derives from a work of art. There are other reasons,too, of course. In a country like Pakistan, with such a troubled history, cultural involvement of the kind fostered by literary festivals can have a uniting and positive effect. The more other cities follow Karachi’s example, the better it will be for the nation.

More festivals in Pakistan will have the positive effect of letting the world see us for who we really are. Not the thugs who shoot girls going to school. Not the poor indoctrinated kids sent to blow themselves up among Shias. But a highly cultured people who have created, are now creating, and will continue to create works of art of great beauty. How many nations can claim that they have taken the language of their former colonial rulers and are producing a literature in it that surpasses that being produced by writers native to the language?

The writer is the author of twelve books of fiction, six volumes of poetry, five of literary criticism and an autobiography written in his twenties.

This article was published in the Herald's March 2013 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

When liquidators for Abraaj Capital filed their first report on the value of assets held by the troubled private equity fund, they put the value of K-Electric at 331 million US dollars. This was in July 2018. The amount was slightly less than what Abraaj Capital claimed to have injected into the company as equity when they acquired it back in October 2008. Undoubtedly this valuation would come as a disappointment to the K-Electric management since only two years earlier, in October 2016, Abraaj Capital had announced its intention to divest its stake in the power utility for 1.77 billion US dollars to Shanghai Power of China.

“Upon completion, this will be one of the largest private sector transactions in Pakistan and represent one of the global power industry’s most well-recognised operational turnaround stories,” the company proudly announced on that day. This was no mere bragging. From October 2008 to October 2016, the company claimed to have added over 1,000 megawatts of additional generation capacity and caused transmission and distribution losses to drop by 12 percentage points. Its biggest boast was that in 2012, four years into its acquisition, the company recorded its first net positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in 17 years. In the financial year 2011-2012, it recorded EBITDA of 3.5 billion rupees. In its latest financial results for the year 2016, EBITDA was at 44 billion rupees.

None of this was easy to achieve. In the nearly ten years that K-Electric spent under the Abraaj management, it saw two chief executive officers come and go, riots led by labour unions engulf its head office and found itself battling government intransigence on multiple fronts.

The provincial government of Sindh and its various offices and entities were its biggest consumers and defaulters, the state-owned gas company had a long-running feud with it on gas supplies, the power sector regulator repeatedly refused its requests for tariff hikes and the federal government struggled to build consensus for approval of its eventual sale or to intervene in its numerous run-ins with government entities.

Along the way it also had to abandon its Plan A for divestment that involved unbundling the vertically integrated utility and selling off its generation, transmission and distribution assets separately. That plan was stonewalled by the regulator which refused to unbundle K-Electric’s licence, which only allows for an integrated power utility. So Abraaj Capital fell back on Plan B: sell the entire entity as an integrated proposition to a strategic investor. It took at least two years to find that strategic investor in the form of Shanghai Power and by October 2016 the deal was finally sealed for transfer of shares and management control of K-Electric to the Chinese firm.

All that is now at stake as growing troubles at Dubai-based Abraaj Capital threaten to engulf K-Electric as well. For two years, Abraaj Capital battled with the government to get the relevant approvals while the K-Electric management pleaded with the regulator for the right tariff at which a deal worth 1.77 billion US dollars could be closed. But as liquidators and creditors now move in to organise a firesale of Abraaj Capital assets to pay off the private equity firm’s more than a billion dollars in debts, time could be running out for the sale to go through, at least at the price hoped for.

The regulator has not approved the tariff, and the new government may decide to revisit the matter of government approvals which could delay matters by several more months at least. Abraaj Capital may not have several more months given the speed at which its situation is changing.

Do they have a Plan C? Chances are that Shanghai Power’s appetite for a large investment in a Pakistani utility will persist unless there is a material change in Pakistan’s relationship with China. The only thing that might change, given the realities at K-Electric’s end, would be the price.

The writer is a business editor at the daily Dawn.

This was originally published in the September 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Back when it was formed in 1967, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) quickly grew to become a viable alternative to established political parties that were increasingly viewed as part of a problematic status quo presided over by General Ayub Khan. With its charismatic leader and its message of radical social and economic change, the party would go on to bag a majority of seats in West Pakistan in the 1970 elections after winning over the support of key constituencies such as labour, peasants, students and urban professionals.

Yet, for all the rhetoric that surrounded its victory, it quickly became evident that PPP in power was a different beast from the party that had campaigned against inequality and oppression. Starry-eyed socialists and other progressive activists who had formed the core of its leadership in its formative years were quickly sidelined once it formed its government in the aftermath of the traumatic loss of East Pakistan in 1971. Many eventually left the party, complaining that it had lost its way and become beholden to the very interests it had sought to oppose.

PPP’s transformation from a party of change to one upholding the status quo should not have been entirely unexpected. Despite its indisputable popularity, the party was, at least partially, reliant on established landed politicians to win votes in Punjab and Sindh and this dependency only increased over time. Understandably enough, their electoral indispensability provided those politicians with considerable influence over questions of policy. In the grand scheme of things, vote-getters inevitably proved to be more important than ideologues sitting outside the Parliament.

As the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) begins its tenure in government after winning the 2018 elections, it is easy to see some parallels with the events of the 1970s. While PTI is no PPP and Imran Khan is no Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, what is common between the two parties and their leaders is their seemingly inevitable capitulation to political reality, with slogans of hope and change giving way to accepting the need to compromise in the quest to win votes.

There has been a lot of debate on PTI’s reliance on electables – constituency politicians who have the ability to win their seats regardless of party associations – to secure victory in the 2018 polls. There has been, in fact, a long-standing split within the party between the electables, almost all of whom have been inducted into PTI over the last half a decade, and a so-called ‘ideological’ wing comprised of an older cadre of leaders and activists who have been associated with the party since its inception in 1996.

Those PTI leaders who supported the electable route to government have always argued that fielding established politicians as candidates, even when they have questionable reputations and shifting loyalties, is a necessary evil in an electoral system that favours influence over ideology. Its critics have always pointed out that systemic change can hardly be expected from those whose politics has thrived on maintaining the status quo.

If one looks at the composition of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s cabinet, there are plenty of reasons to share the scepticism of these critics. Of its 16 members (excluding five non-elected advisers), only three (Asad Umar, Shireen Mazari and Aamir Kiyani) did not hold ministerial positions either under General Pervez Musharraf (2002-07) or during PPP’s fourth government (2008-13).

What this means is that the vast majority of the cabinet’s members were aligned with other political entities at different points in the past, with some – such as Khusro Bakhtiar, minister for water resources, planning, development and reforms – having defected to PTI from the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) as late as May 2018. Six other members of the cabinet are from PTI’s coalition partners, arguably a disproportionately large number given the relatively small presence of these partners in the Parliament.

Contrary to what many core PTI supporters might have liked to see, cabinet portfolios are rarely awarded based on expertise. This is mainly because the actual task of formulating and implementing policy is usually not the responsibility of a minister. It is, instead, handled by the bureaucracy and experts staffing government departments. While it obviously does not hurt to have ministers who have a good grasp of their ministry’s remit, or who have experience relevant to their posts, much of their work is to provide leadership to officials working under them and to oversee implementation of the government’s agenda.

As such, in a context where ministers do not necessarily require subject-specific skills, what is the selection criteria that is used when forming a cabinet?

Around the world, not just in Pakistan, ministerial positions are often part of a broader system of reward and patronage used to cement alliances, repay loyalty and influence political environment. In this sense, Imran Khan’s choices are predictably pedestrian.

It is not surprising to find people like Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad (minister for railways), Fehmida Mirza (minister for inter-provincial coordination) and Ghulam Sarwar Khan (minister for petroleum) being rewarded for their defection to/support for PTI just as the appointment of Shah Mehmood Qureshi (minister for foreign affairs), Fawad Chaudhry (minister for information and broadcasting) and Shafqat Mehmood (minister for education) makes sense given the loyalty they have shown towards Imran Khan since joining his party and the central role they have played in PTI’s long campaign to outsmart its main rival, PMLN, before, during and even after the elections.

In rewarding opportunism and loyalty through cabinet appointments, Imran Khan is not very different from his predecessors. And if the past is going to be reflected in the future in a similar fashion, there is no reason to believe that his cabinet will not grow in the years ahead even though its current size is much smaller than the two that preceded it.

The same logic that seems to have underpinned cabinet appointments also appears to inform other appointments Imran Khan is making. While the new chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mehmood Khan is a relatively new entrant to politics, his family has been associated with PPP in the past. He also served as a provincial minister under PTI’s previous government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with no obvious distinction.

Another case in point is the selection of Sardar Usman Buzdar as chief minister of Punjab. While Imran Khan announced his name as a radical move to bring an unknown politician from a backward part of the province to power, Buzdar’s father is a tribal chieftain who has remained a member of the Punjab Assembly in the past. He himself was elected as tehsil nazim from Taunsa, his native area, during the Musharraf regime and has remained in different parties including PMLN. It is equally important to note that he has faced allegations of corruption, and reportedly even of complicity in murder, in the past.

His appointment, therefore, may have more to do with his strategic value as a politician from south Punjab, an area that PTI would like to turn into one of its core constituencies in the future. His selection may also be because of his reported closeness to Jehangir Tareen, one of Imran Khan’s most trusted aides, rather than due to any specific acumen he may have for running Pakistan’s largest province. Similarly, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi’s elevation as the Punjab Assembly speaker, Asad Qaiser’s election as the National Assembly speaker and Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar’s reappointment as governor of Punjab all smack of rewards being offered for continued political support in the case of the former and unstinted loyalty in the case of the latter two.

Another area in which Imran Khan and PTI have not really differed from their predecessors is the gender balance of the cabinet. With only three female members, the federal cabinet has an extremely skewed gender ratio. The nomination of yet more men for other posts, such as governorships and the presidency, means that PTI has missed the opportunity to have more women in high offices. Similarly, there is no representation of religious minorities in any of the high offices of the state and government, and the cabinet continues to remain a bastion of wealth and privilege with virtually all of the ministers drawn from among the political and economic elite of the country.

How the new ministers will perform in the months and years ahead remains to be seen but their past records in government, their political, economic and social backgrounds, and the motives underpinning their appointments do not inspire much confidence. For now, PTI’s Naya Pakistan does not seem very different from what it is replacing.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

This article was published in the Herald's September 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.